Nikola Nardelli

Nikola Nardelli later Nikolaus Freiherr von Nardelli (born June 25, 1857 in Ragusa / Dubrovnik , Dalmatia; † December 4, 1925 there ) was an Austrian civil servant and governor in the Kingdom of Dalmatia .

resume

Niko Nardelli was the only civil governor of the Austrian crown land of Dalmatia who was a Dalmatian himself. He came from a middle-class family and was perfectly trilingual. He had Croatian as his mother tongue, Italian as the language of instruction in middle school and studied (in German) law at the University of Graz . In 1881 he entered the political civil service at the Lieutenancy in Zadar . On May 28, 1898, he was appointed councilor with title and character. One year later, on June 7, 1899, he became a real councilor. In 1905 he took over the management of the Lieutenancy and was appointed Lieutenant by the Emperor in January 1906. In May 1911 Nardelli was raised to the nobility, in October 1911 he retired. In May 1917, Emperor Karl I appointed him to the manor house of the Vienna Imperial Council, of which he was a member until the end of the Danube monarchy. Nardelli was not married and had no children.

Services

As a “political official”, Nardelli had on the one hand to put instructions from Vienna into practice and to represent the government's policy towards the Crown Land, on the other hand, as head of the state, he was the highest political authority in the country. After the “Resolution of Fiume” in 1905 (Rijeka), he vehemently opposed the exponents of the new Croatian-Serbian-Hungarian understanding and, in some cases, massively intervened in the candidate list before the 1907 Reichsrat elections. His successes for what was then the second poorest crown land of the monarchy include a program to improve the economy of Dalmatia (road construction, port expansion, drainage of swamps and thus the reduction of malaria, building schools, development of tourism). He was able to contain the violent conflicts between the smallholders (colonies) and the landowners by means of compromise proposals. His greatest success was the introduction of Croatian instead of the official Italian language in Dalmatia. He had prepared the necessary agreement between the parties in Dalmatia in tough negotiations and then pushed through the proposals in Vienna. Nardelli experienced the practical implementation on January 1, 1912, when he was retired. In the pension Nardelli worked as a painter. Portraits of historical personalities from Ragusa are in the Dominican monastery in Dubrovnik.

Awards

• 1898 Councilor
• 1899 Real Councilor
• 1906 Grand Officer's Cross of the Civil Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany
• 1907 Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy
• 1907 Privy Council

literature

• Kalwoda, Johannes, Reichsrat Elections and Party Structure in Dalmatia (1907 to 1910). In: Österreichische Osthefte 46 (Vienna 2004) pp. 21–50.

• Kalwoda, Johannes, State influence in Imperial Council elections in Dalmatia before and after the electoral reform of 1907 and the political environment from a governor's perspective, in: Thomas SIMON (Ed.), Hundred Years of General and Equal Suffrage in Austria. Modern suffrage under the conditions of a multi-ethnic state (= Rechtshistorische Reihe, 400), Frankfurt aM a. a. 2010, pp. 287-353.

• Perić, Ivo, Politički portreti iz prošlosti dalmacije (Political portraits from the Dalmatian past: Niko Nardelli in his role as Austrian governor in Dalmatia). (Split 1990) pp. 193-221.

• Schödl, Günter, Croatian National Policy and “Jugoslavenstvo” (Munich 1990).

Web links

• Wolfgang Pav, Niko Nardelli, Austria's governor in Dalmatia 1906–1911 (PDF; 2.0 MB), dissertation 2010, on the server of the University of Vienna

predecessor	Office	successor
Erasmus of Commerce	Governor (Landeschef) of the Crown Land Kingdom of Dalmatia 1906–1911	Marius Anton von Attems-Heiligenkreuz