
21/11/2024
📝 Danas delimo jednu ličnu priču!
Ko je bio Ivan Đurić?
English ⬇️
SLIDE 1
Ivan Đurić was a historian, a representative of the Belgrade Byzantine school, a professor at the University of Belgrade, and a lecturer at the Sorbonne. His personal story was written by a participant in our project and his niece, Ksenija Đurić.
He earned his PhD with the thesis “The Time of John VIII Palaiologos,” after which he became a professor at the Department of Byzantine Studies. His most significant book is The Twilight of Byzantium, which has been translated into several languages.
During the political crisis in the SFRY in the late 1980s, Ivan began to get politically involved.
SLIDE 2
At the urging of numerous friends and colleagues, Ivan ran for president of Serbia in the first multi-party elections in 1990. He was the joint candidate of the United Democratic Initiative (UJDI) and the Union of Reformist Forces in Serbia (SRSS).
Unprepared and without any financial resources for conducting a campaign, he finished in third place, with 300,000 votes, after the then-president Slobodan Milošević and opposition candidate Vuk Drašković. Due to media attacks and threats directed at him and his family members, he was forced to leave Serbia and move to France.
He remained in Paris to live and work until his untimely death, caused by a short and severe illness, on November 23, 1997.
Slide 3
After his death, in October 2003, his family donated his personal archive to the Historical Archive of Belgrade. The collection, stored in 33 boxes, contains materials that reflect the life and work of Ivan Đurić, as well as the time in which he lived.
One anecdote about the defense of his thesis is still recounted today at the Faculty of Philosophy. He completed his postgraduate studies in 1974 with a thesis on the topic “The Foca Family” (a Byzantine aristocratic family that played an important role in Byzantine politics during the 9th and 10th centuries). Specifically, when the news of the defense of this master’s thesis was published in the daily newspapers, biology students attended the defense, mistakenly thinking the topic would be about seals (foca in Serbian).