Simon Rutar

Simon Rutar (12 October 1851 – 3 May 1903) was a Slovene historian and geographer. He wrote primarily on the history and geography of the areas that are now part of the Slovenian Littoral, the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Croatian counties of Istria and Primorsko-Goranska.

Rutar was born in a peasant family in the Alpine village of Krn near Kobarid, in what was then the Austrian county of Gorizia and Gradisca (now in Slovenia).

He attended the State Secondary School in Gorizia. In 1873 he enrolled at the University of Graz, where he studied history, geography, and philology. In Graz, he was shaped by the contemporary positivist approaches in human sciences. In 1878 he was mobilized in the Austro-Hungarian Army, in a unit sent to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was demobilized in Autumn 1879 and returned to Graz. The following year he got a job as a high school history teacher in the Dalmatian town of Kotor. In 1882, he moved to Split, where he taught at the local lyceum for the next eight years. There, he met Frane Bulić, a Croatian historian and archeologist who introduced him to the latest trends in archeology.