Senj
Senj made this family and then stopped being able to feed it. Every occupation in the record — day labourer, porter, sailor, cigarette-factory hand — is a consequence of one decision taken in 1873.
Senj sits under the Velebit at the head of the Senjska draga, where the bura comes off the mountain hard enough to stop traffic. It is one of the oldest towns on the Croatian coast, and for four hundred years it was a place of consequence: a free royal town, a bishopric, a Habsburg military port, and the home of the Uskoks.
The Uskoks and Nehaj
When the Ottomans took Klis in 1537, its defenders — refugees the Slavs called uskoci, “the ones who jumped in” — fell back to Senj. The Habsburgs put them on the frontier payroll and let them raid. They became, depending on who was writing, a Christian bulwark or a pirate confederacy; in practice both, because Vienna paid them irregularly and they took the difference out of Venetian and Ottoman shipping.
In 1558 the captain Ivan Lenković built Nehaj on the hill above the town, using stone from the churches and monasteries outside the walls so that a besieger would have nothing to shelter behind. It was the Uskok headquarters until the Uskok War of 1615–18 ended with Venice and Vienna agreeing to disperse them inland. Nehaj still stands over the town, and it is the thing everyone photographs.
1873: the railway goes to Rijeka
Senj's whole nineteenth century was built on being the port where the Lika highlands met the sea. Timber, wool and livestock came down the roads from the interior and went out through Senj. Then the Karlovac–Rijeka railway opened in 1873 and did not come here.
The traffic followed the rails to Rijeka. Senj's port trade collapsed, and it never recovered. This is the single most important economic fact in this archive, because the family's recorded work sits directly downstream of it:
| Toma Blažević 1838–1907 | Nadničar — day labourer. Born at Br. 114, Smokvica Krmpotska; died at Senj and buried there. A man who came off the mountain to a town that had no work left. |
|---|---|
| Josip “Joso” Papić 1857–1939 | Trhonoša, bremenar, gostioničar — load-carrier, porter, innkeeper. The first two are the same job twice: carrying other people's goods on your back for a fee. The third is what he made of it. |
| Ljubomir Blažević 1892–1966 | Mornar — sailor. Born at Rijeka, not Senj — the family had already followed the work to the port that got the railway. He came back, and died at Senj. |
| Milka Papić 1886–1971 | Supervisor of workers at the cigarette factory, Tvornica duhana, Senj. Her sister-in-law Anka Blažević (1893–1953) was a radnica — a floor worker — at the same factory. |
The tobacco factory
The Habsburg tobacco monopoly was extended to Croatia, Slavonia and the Military Frontier by an imperial patent of 20 November 1850, effective from March 1851, and state tobacco factories followed across the region. Senj's was one of them, and for two generations of this family it was the employer of last resort in a town with no port trade — women's work, indoors, waged, and steady in a way that carrying sacks was not.
After the Second World War the Senj factory was liquidated and its cigarette-making machinery was transferred to the tobacco factory at Rovinj. The tree records the building's later life exactly: the address is given as Ul. Stjepana Radića 4, 53270 Senj, with the note that it “now is a textile factory”.
7–8 October 1943
After Italy's capitulation Senj became one of the most important Partisan ports on the Adriatic, and German aircraft bombed the town and harbour over two days in October 1943. Thirty local residents were killed and about half the town was destroyed to its foundations; only a quarter of the buildings were still habitable.
Hedviga was seventeen. Her aunt's husband died on the second day. Senj, 1943 →
And then the boats out
A port town with no port sends its people away. This tree records the destinations plainly: Port Pirie in South Australia, where Ivan Žubrinić went about 1884 and where his descendants still are; Buenos Aires, where Hedviga's cousin Oskar Kosina died in 1954; and then, two generations later, Africa — Hedviga to Rhodesia and then to Johannesburg in April 1975.