Gregor Žerjav

Gregor Žerjav

Gregor Žerjav , sometimes also written Žerjal (born November 14, 1882 in Lož , Austria-Hungary , † June 27, 1929 in Poljče near Radovljica ), was a Slovenian and Yugoslav lawyer and liberal politician . Together with Albert Kramer, he was the leader of the liberal Slovenes in the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.

Life

Žerjav studied law at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1906. He was married to Milena Zerjav, née Lavrencic. The couple had three children, the first Borut, then on March 5, 1912 in Gorizia, the identical twins Nadina and Tatjana.

In the last years of his life he suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis; He went to the Charité in Berlin to attempt an operative cure , where he was one of Ferdinand Sauerbruch's first patients to be operated on using the “ iron lung ”.

A little more than half a year later he died on his estate in Poljče near Radovljica and was buried in the Žale cemetery in Ljubljana . His wife and daughter Tatiana also later died of tuberculosis. His son Borut became a journalist and lived in Paris, his daughter Nadina Abarth-Zerjav married Carlo Abarth and lived in Turin.

politics

In 1908 he became chief coordinator of the National Progressive Party in Carniola . Despite his young age, he became one of the most important financial advisors to the Slovenian national-liberal ruling class. In 1910 he was best known for his involvement in the bankruptcy of Agro Merkur Kreditbank, which had been set up a few years earlier as an institution to support the national Progressive Party. In 1911 he was elected to the Reichsrat - Austrian Parliament , where he became the head of the “Yugoslav Club”, a body of the South Slav national liberal representatives from Slovenia, Istria and Dalmatia .

After the outbreak of World War I , Žerjav founded an underground network that opposed the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in favor of the creation of a unified Yugoslavia. Among his closest collaborators were two other radical liberal nationalists of the younger generation, Albert Kramer and Bogumil Vošnjak .

The Austro-Hungarian authorities never discovered this network. Already in the first months of the First World War , Žerjav was arrested as a preventive measure and imprisoned in Ljubljana Castle for his “notorious proserbian attitudes”. After less than a month, he was again set free, fled in May 1915, when his colleague Bogumil Vošnjak to the West to join there the "Yugoslav Committee", Žerjav was arrested again, and in the city of Gmünd and later in Graz under Guard placed where he spent most of the war.

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Žerjav was part of the delegation of the state of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Southern Slavs, who in December 1918 signed the declaration that established the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.

After 1918, Žerjav became an avid supporter of the Yugoslav centralism of Yugoslav unity. In June 1918 he was among the co-founders of the Yugoslav Democratic Party, which in 1919 became the "State Party of the Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian Democrats".

He was elected to the Yugoslav Parliament for three terms, in 1920, 1925 and 1927 (the first time as a representative of the Democratic Party of Yugoslavia) and the last two on the list of the Independent Democratic Party. From December 1921 to December 1922 he served as Minister for Welfare and between November 1924 and July 1925 as Minister of Forestry and Mining in the Democratic Coalition of the government of Nikola Pašić ( Radical People's Party ).

swell

• Information from Nadina Abarth-Zerjav

Individual evidence

1. ^ Igor Grdina , Slovenci med tradicijo in perspective (Ljubljana: Študentska založba, 2003), 198.
2. ^ Igor Grdina, Slovenci med tradicijo in perspective (Ljubljana: Študentska založba, 2003), 250.
3. ^ Igor Grdina, Slovenci med tradicijo in perspective (Ljubljana: Študentska založba, 2003), 251.