Matija Murko

Matija Murko also known as Mathias Murko (10 February 1861 – 11 February 1952) was a Slovene scholar, known mostly for his work on oral epic traditions in Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian.

Murko was born in the small village of Drstelja near Ptuj, Lower Styria, in what was then the Austrian Empire and is now in Slovenia. He attended high school in Ptuj and Maribor. He studied Slavic and Germanic philology at the University of Vienna, where he was a pupil of Franc Miklošič. After obtaining his PhD in Vienna in 1886, he went to postdoctoral studies to Moscow. From 1897 to 1902, he taught Slavic philology at the University of Vienna, from 1902 to 1917 at the University of Graz, and from 1917 to 1920 at the University of Leipzig. From 1920 to 1931, he taught at Charles University in Prague, where he settled and lived until his death in 1952. At the Charles University he founded the Slavic Institute (Slovanský ústav), which he led until 1941.

Murko had an intense social life and was a personal friend of figures as Ivan Hribar, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Karel Kramář. During his lifetime, he became a member of numerous academies of sciences around Europe, especially in Slavic countries: the Yugoslav, the Serbian, the Czech, the Soviet, the Bulgarian, the Polish and the Slovenian. He received a doctorate honoris causa from Charles University in Prague in 1909 and from the University of Ljubljana in 1951.

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