Bartol Kasic (1575-1650), a Croatian Jesuit, was the author of the first Croatian Grammar “Institutiones lingue illyricae”, printed in Rome 1604. About the same time he prepared the Croatian – Italian dictionary, which remained unpublished until 1990. In the period of 1631-1636 he translated the whole Bible into spoken Croatian, but unfortunately the book remained only in handwriting. In his “Ritual Rimski” (“Rituale Romanum”, Rome, 1640) he cites very old Croatian names for months that are in use even today (more about this):

2. sijecanj (January) 2. veljaca (February) 3. ozujak (March) 4. travanj(April) 5. svibanj (May) 6. lipanj (June) 7. srpanj (July) 8. kolovoz (August) 9. rujan (September) 10. listopad (October) 11. studeni (November) 12. prosinac (December)

• In 1999 we celebrated four centuries of Croatian philology, which has started with Bartol Kasic. His work was very important in standardization of the Croatian language, using the principle “write as you speak”.
• He also wrote one of the earliest autobiographic books in Croatia describing the consequences of the Turkish Ottoman occupation. In one of his writings he concludes: I stop here, crying and sighing when I remember all that I saw with my own eyes: profaned churches, settlements completely destroyed, so that nothing was left except tents, hovels, huts. Let God have mercy on us and let him bless us… Let him illuminate us with his Face and Word, and let him have mercy on Croatian people, which is crushed and almost heart-broken.
• In 1612 he opened the gymnasium for the Catholic youth in Belgrade (mostly for children of native Catholics and the Dubrovnik merchants). At that time Belgrade was under the Turks. This was the first gymnasium in Serbia.
• Two samples of Kasic’s Cathecism are held in Bibliothéque Nationale (former Bibliothéque Royale) in Paris, France.

• For more information see Vladimir Horvat: Bartol Kasic; cetiri stoljeca hrvatskog jezikoslovlja, Zagreb, 1989. In this book you can also find important information about Dominican Glagolitic priest Beniamin de Croatia.
• It is interesting that in Kasic’s dictionary one can find the name of “tesla”, meaning adze. One of grand-grandfathers of the famous inventor Nikola Tesla was Draganic, nicknamed Tesla. I owe this information to dr. Vladimir Muljevic, professor emeritus of the University of Zagreb.