Franjo Rački
| Franjo Rački | |
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| Born |
25 November 1828 Fužine, Austrian Empire |
| Died | 13 February 1894 (aged 65) Zagreb, Austria-Hungary |
| Occupation | Historian, politician, writer |
| Nationality | Croatian |
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Franjo Rački (25 November 1828 – 13 February 1894) was a Croatian historian, politician and writer. He compiled important collections of old Croatian diplomatic and historical documents, wrote some pioneering historical works, and was a key founder of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Rački was born in Fužine, near Rijeka. He completed his secondary education in Senj and Varaždin. He graduated theology in Senj, where he was ordained Catholic priest by the bishop Ožegović in 1852. Rački received his PhD in theology in Vienna in 1855.
His career as a historian began as soon as he started working as a teacher in Senj. An industrious man, full of patriotic fervor, Rački organized the research of Glagolitic documents on the islands of Kvarner. He often went to the village of Baška on Krk, the location of the famous Baška Tablet. After analyzing the tablet for a long time, he published Viek i djelovanje sv. Cirilla i Methoda slavjamkih apošlolov (The Age and Activities of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Apostles among the Slavs).
He was moved from Senj to Rome in 1857. There he worked in the Croatian Institute of St Jerome for three years, in difficult circumstances. He went around Roman archives in search of documents on Croatian history. He also attended courses in paleography and related historical sciences.
In Rome he found many documents on Bogomils, collected by the Catholic Church during the medieval struggle against that heresy. Fifteen years later, Rački would publish Bogomili i Patareni, a milestone in the research on the Bosnian Church. In the book, Rački founded the "Bogomil hypothesis", saying that the Bosnian Church was influenced by the dualist heretic teachings from Bulgaria, originating in the 9th century. As it was very controversial and intriguing, that theory dominated the research for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, but its general premises have been mostly refuted.
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