Count Josip Jelačić

Count Josip Jelačić (1801-1859) was a Croatian ban, imperial secret adviser, general, poet.

He came from the old noble family Jelačić of Bužim. Josip was born on October 16, 1801 in Petrovaradin (a house in the current Vladimira Nazor street number 3), where he was baptized in the monastery church of St. Juraj. His father Franjo, a major general of the Austrian imperial army, was the commander of the Petrovaradin fortress at the time. On April 8, 1848, Josip Jelačić took the oath of Ban in Vienna and was appointed field marshal lieutenant and military commander in Ban and Krajina Croatia. On the square of St. Katarina in Zagreb on June 4 of the same year, Josip Jelačić was enthroned as ban, and on the same day there was a ceremonial session of the first Croatian Citizens’ Assembly based on original rights based on the principles of civil liberalism. By a special proclamation of April 25, 1848, Ban abolished serfdom in Croatia and Slavonia, declared the Croatian language official, and in May of the same year established the Ban council as a kind of government of the triune kingdom. During the stormy times of the 1848-1849 revolution, Jelačić was one of the most prominent military leaders. Although disappointed with the new constitution of the Habsburg Monarchy, with which the young emperor Francis Joseph introduced absolutism, centralism and Germanization, ban Jelačić contributed to the emancipation of the ideas of the Croatian revival, the promotion of the use of the Croatian language and the strengthening of the economy in Croatia with his valuable social and cultural activities. Through his efforts, the diocese of Zagreb was raised to the rank of archdiocese, which practically made it independent from the Hungarian episcopate.

He spent the last years of his life, ill, in Novi Dvori in Zaprešić, where he died on May 20, 1859. His body was embalmed, and he was buried on May 26, 1859. year in Novi Dvori in the chapel of St. Josip in Zaprešić.