Il Fiore di discorsi del predicatore-patriota fra' Filip Grabovac, suddito della Serenissima

Abstract The author considers the literary and human experience of the Franciscan Dalmatian Filip Grabovac, in the background of cultural history of Balcanic lands under Venetian rule in the first half of the eighteenth century. The only Grabovac book, the Cvit razgovora naroda i jezika slovinskoga Iliti hrvatskoga (Flower of conversations of the Illyrian or Croatian people and language, 1747), is examined in its cultural and religious context (the activity of Franciscans of Bosnia and Dalmatia) and in its literary and linguistic-literary framework (Croatian literature and vulgar languages). The Cvit is a work in verse and prose, consisting of two parts, the first one with a strong moralistic-didactic tendency, and the second historical part displaying great attention to the current fate of the Croatian Catholic populations. A miscellaneous work with medieval flavour, it seems to be the issue of Franciscan tradition in Balcanic area, a tradition imbued with heroic and patriarchal war-culture, fully expressed by folk epics in the Dinaric area, which made the Franciscans a significant component of anti-turkish front in the country. Just the stressing of this heroic and patriotic element makes Grabovac and his Cvit incompatible with the political system of the Serenissima, that will imprison the writer and destroy his work.