COURAGE

connecting collections

Ljubomir Tadić was born in Montenegro in 1925. He spent the Second World War as a partisan, and entered the Law Faculty of the University of Belgrade after the war, completing his studies in 1952. In 1959, he defended his doctoral dissertation in Ljubljana. Tadić started his university career in 1954 as an assistant at the Faculty of Law in Sarajevo, and soon became an associate professor. In 1962 he became a senior advisor at the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade. From 1963 until his dismissal in 1975, he worked as a full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade.

In 1968, Ljubomir Tadić was one of the leaders of the student protests in Belgrade, beginning his conflicts with the government. After that time, he was often targeted by critics and impeded by the government. Tadić was also one of the Belgrade “Praxis” members. Praxis was a group of philosophers of the so-called “creative”, non-dogmatic Marxism that formed in the early 1960s in Yugoslavia. This resulted in his removal from the Faculty of Philosophy in early 1975, together with seven other professors and assistants, who were labeled "morally and politically unsuitable". This attack on the professors of the Belgrade University marked the end of the Korčula school, Praxis, and the journal Philosophy published by the Philosophical Society of Serbia.

From 1976, Ljubomir Tadić participated in the work of the newly founded Open University (known as Otvoreni [Open] or Slobodni [Free] in the literature). The aim of the Open University was the informal gathering (in private houses) and discussion on various social, political, and artistic topics. Many critically minded intellectuals gathered there, including Dragomir Olujić, Dobrica Cosić, and Lazar Stojanović.

Tadić became publicly active again in the early 1980s, together with Dobrica Cosić, Svetozar Stojanović, Zoran Djindjić, Nebojša Popov, Vojislav Stojanović, and others, when he tried to launch the journal Javnost [Publicity] in 1980. This paper sought to bring together critical intellectuals, and a call for cooperation was sent to over 400 individuals. The timing of the initiative’s launch, a few months after Tito's death, proved not to be the best. Political sensitivity at that particular moment resulted in its ban even before the journal was published.

One year later, Tadić was re-employed as a scientific adviser at the Center for Philosophy and Social Theory, founded in 1981, within the existing Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade. This center would become where the intellectual democratic opposition to the Yugoslav regime gathered in the 1980s, and later similarly against the Milosević regime.

Together with Dobrica Costić, Ljubomir Tadić was one of the co-founders of the Odbor za zaštitu slobode misli i izražavanja [Committee for the Protection of Freedom of Thought and Expression] which was established in 1984. In the following years the work of the committee, which gathered mainly intellectuals from Belgrade, attracted public attention thanks to the publication of two texts - Predloga za ukidanje neopravdanih ograničenja sloboda i prava [Proposal for the Abolition of Unjustified Restrictions on Freedoms and Rights] (1985) and Predloga za uspostavljanje vladavine prava [Proposal for the Establishment of the Rule of Law] (1986). The Committee put pressure on the government and the public by organizing petitions in which hundreds of Yugoslav intellectuals participated. Initially, the Committee defended all critics of the government regardless of their nationality, but this changed when the political crises began at the end of the 1980s and it began engaging in other issues, particularly with the national Serbian cause in Yugoslavia.

In 1985, Tadić became a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, elected as a regular member in 1994.

At the time Yugoslavia was dissolving, Ljubomir Tadić was engaged in the democratic opposition and was one of the 13 founders of the Democratic Party in December 1989. His son, Boris Tadić, was the president of the Democratic Party and President of Serbia from 2004 to 2012.

Against the frequent accusations that he changed from a leftist into a nationalist, Ljubomir Tadić maintained in the weekly NIN (2004) that "In my books you cannot find that I have advocated some kind of nationalistic attitudes. But, in terms of justice and injustice, I have always made myself clear. Further on I consider that the Western policy is a great political injustice towards the Serbs. […] It turns out that the only aggressors are Serbs, while all the other are illustrated as the poor innocents. I cannot accept such an injustice, it is my determination. So, it is not a nationalist-chauvinistic view, but an attitude against the obvious lasting injustice."

Ljubomir Tadić passed away in Belgrade on December 31 2013.  

Gábor Takács Bencze is a former journalist and gay activist. With his partner László Láner, he was the founder and member of the first Hungarian gay association and then also the founder and editor of the Hungarian gay magazine Others (Mások), which ceased publication in 2008. Now he is retired.

Architect Ovidiu Marian Taloş is the initiator of the Orașul Memorabil (The Memorable City) project, whose purpose is to salvage the photographic heritage concerning the history of the city of Braşov. Born in Braşov on 21 June 1978, Taloș studied at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest from 1997 to 2003. In 2005, he took his master’s degree in the Anthropology of the Sacred Space at the same university. Since completing his traineeship, he has practised as an architect in Braşov. He is a member of the Romanian Order of Architects–Braşov, Covasna, and Harghita Branch (Ordinul Arhitecţilor din România–Filiala Teritorială Braşov, Covasna, Harghita) and of its territorial committee, one of the leading structures of this regional branch. Professionally, he has distinguished himself through awards received for architectural projects, namely, first prize at the “No man’s land-uri urbane” (Urban no-man’s-lands) contest organised in Braşov in 2009 and an honourable mention at “Open Source House–Ghana” at Delft University of Technology the following year.
In 2010, he laid the foundations of the cultural project Orașul Memorabil, which he coordinated with Miruna Stroe. By virtue of numerous people’s providing photographic material, the project gave rise to a digital archive reflecting the history of Braşov through daily life. Approximately a third of the Braşov–Oraşul Memorabil Collection covers the communist period. Some of the photos reflect the photographers’ critical view on social realities in communist Romania. Exceptional cases in point are those photos that feature the urban policy of the communist authorities, which led to the demolition of buildings and even whole areas in Braşov. The project’s photographic archive has been promoted through annual displays placed in public spaces in Braşov, but also through the project’s online website. Using the photographic heritage of the Orașul Memorabil project, Ovidiu Taloş has set up exhibitions hosted by the Romanian Cultural Institute in Budapest (2012–2013), the Romanian Cultural Institute in Vienna (2014) and Haus des Deutschen Ostens (House of East European Germans) in Munich in 2014. The exhibitions were organised in collaboration with the GIL Corona association and the Romanian Cultural Institute. Apart from the Oraşul Memorabil project, Ovidiu Taloş initiated and coordinated from 2012 to 2015, together with Miruna Stroe, the cultural projects Arhitecții și arhitectura în Brașov, 1870–1914 (Architects and architecture in Braşov, 1870-1914) and Arhitecții și arhitectura industrială în Brașov (Architects and industrial architecture in Braşov). These projects were financed by the local authorities of Braşov and from the architectural stamp tax collected and administrated by the Romanian Order of Architects.

After secondary school, Sigitas Tamkevičius started studying at the Catholic seminary in 1955. In 1957-1960 he served in the Soviet army, and in 1960 he continued his studies at the seminary. In 1962, Tamkevičius was ordained a Catholic priest. In 1962-1975, he served as a parish priest in the Lithuanian countryside. He became a Jesuit in 1968. In 1969, the Soviet government forbade him to serve as a priest, and he was forced to work in a factory. In 1972-1983, he initiated and edited the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. Tamkevičius established a committee for defending the rights of believers in 1978. In 1983 he was arrested and investigated by the KGB. In 1983-1988, he was imprisoned in a labour camp in Perm and Mordovia (Russia). During the national revival, Tamkevičius became head of the Catholic seminary, and in 1991 he was consecrated as a bishop by Pope John Paul II. In 1996 he became an archbishop, and in 2005-2014 he was chair of the Conference of Lithuanian Bishops. He served in this role until 2015.

Miklós Tamási attended high school in the 1980s, and like many of his peers, he had a hard time fitting into the world of the Kádár era. He was not interested in his studies, as he was an autonomous, tough, but not rebellious teenager. With considerable difficulty and after having changed schools several times, he completed his high school diploma. Nevertheless, the Margit Kaffka High School was an important backdrop for him: the small photo laboratory in the attic of the school was his favourite spot. Here, he and his friend Ákos Szepessy printed out photos they had found at clear-out sales. Tamási shared the following recollections in a 2016 interview with HVG: “I was trying to escape the greyness of the Kádár era and flee to memories of lost times. Even the piano at my grandmother’s house made a huge difference. My father was studying at the Budapest University of Technology in 1956 [at the time of the Hungarian revolution], and he often talked about those times. I was very interested in it, and I must have thought of him as a hero, since I was wearing his leather jacket, which barely fit me, and I also wore a pin with a Kossuth crest [the symbol worn by the rebels] that I bought at Ecseri flea market.”

At the time of the change of regimes, Tamási became more interested in politics. In the spring of 1988, he joined Fidesz, but as he did not find the party radical enough, he chose the Magyar Október Párt (Hungarian October Party), led by György Krassó, instead. He participated in protests organized by the Duna Kör (Duna Circle) against the construction of the Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros Dams, and he smuggled medicine to Romania (the shipment was provided by a Swiss charity organization).

Searching for pictures about the 1956 revolution became his passion, and this passion only intensified after the transition. In 1992–1993, he joined the “University of Technology 1956” Foundation, and he held interviews with former students at the university who were involved in the revolution. He met Tibor Beke through these interviews, who was sentenced to six years after 1956 for collecting photographs. As Tamási recalls, Beke “had a connection to József Teucher, who was the production manager at the Hunnia Studio at the time of the revolution, coordinating the cameramen. József Taucher was of course scapegoated as a servant of imperialism, who encouraged the production of the documentary ‘against the people.’ Beke, who was 23 years old at the time, collected photo materials about the revolution with Taucher. Their goal was to smuggle this material to the West, so the whole world could see that the revolution had been a democratic one.” Tamási was shocked by Beke’s story, and it encouraged him to salvage this photographic heritage. He looked up Beke’s photo collection in the documents stored at the Budapest City Archives and managed to find it.

Tamási also visited András B. Hegedüs, the founder and director of the 1956 Institute, and proposed that they start collecting photos about the revolution. Hegedűs supported the idea, so Tamási, in addition to writing letters to participants in the revolution asking for photographs, also started to look through press materials from 1957 searching for cityscapes with traces of the events. He found a photo with these kinds of traces, and according to the newspaper, the source was the UVATERV road construction company. In the storage facility of the newly privatized company, he found boxes containing the photo collection which came to some 150,000 pictures, all of excellent quality, many of which had been taken in 1957 or 1958. He bought a scanner and digitized a portion of the material. He tried to negotiate with Városháza Kiadó (City hall Publishing) about publishing the pictures, but he failed to prevail on the institution to allow their publication. He was called up for two years of compulsory military service, and this put an end to these attempts.

After the transition, Tamási lived off money earned doing odd jobs. He worked, for instance, as a motorcycle postman, a picture framer, and a furniture carrier. He spent half a year in Krakow in 1992 on a scholarship learning Polish. Later, he enrolled in the Polish program of the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen. However, after having spent another six months in Warsaw, he left the university and did not graduate. Nevertheless, his knowledge of Polish did come in handy later on: when the Open Society Archives (OSA) received the materials which had belonged to Radio Free Europe, they needed help organizing the material, so Tamási was commissioned to take charge of the Polish material in 1999. He then got a job at the Central Gallery as an exhibition organizer. In the meantime, he graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2006 as a typographer.

While working at OSA, he spent most of his time looking after Fortepan. Thus, OSA was providing him a form of informal support. However, Tamási did not want to burden the institution: he quit in 2015 and started to focus solely on Fortepan. His small office is provided by the local government of the I District of Budapest for a rental price of 40,000 HUF. The enthusiastic volunteers and supporters play a major role in reducing maintenance costs.

In addition to the work he does for Fortepan, Tamási also contributes to programs and initiatives which help young people in Budapest get to know their neighbourhoods and their history better. Thus, from 2011, he and others annually organize the program series Budapest100, which offers guided tours of otherwise closed buildings or less well-known districts of Budapest. In 2014, as part of the Yellow-Star Houses project, buildings became memorials commemorating the forced relocation of Jewish people in Budapest and thus familiarizing the next generation with this burdensome legacy of the city’s and country’s past.

In 2017, Tamási made it on the “New Europe 100” list compiled by Res Publica, Google, the International Visegrad Fund, and the Financial Times. The list features “individuals from Central and Eastern Europe who are changing the world and improving people’s lives with ideas that scale up in the digital world.”

Born in 1938 in Budapest. Studied at ELTE Budapest, has degrees as a Hungarian and German instructor. After graduating, worked as a supervisor for a short period, and has worked as a freelance writer and translator since 1971.

At the end of the 1970s, he withdrew from public life, and for more than ten years he was visible to the public only through his writings: In this period, the sparrows with which he lived and from which he drew inspiration for most of his works, played an important role.

Writer and journalist Dominik Tatarka belonged to the most important Slovak writers of the twentieth century. He studied at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague Slovak, Czech and French languages. He studied also at the Sorbonne University in Paris from 1938 to 1939. Then, he became a secondary school teacher. During the Second World War he entered the Czechoslovak Communist Party and he actively took part at the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. After the war, he worked as an editor and journalist in several Slovak newspapers and magazines. He was also a screenwriter of the Czechoslovak Film in Bratislava. From an enthusiastic communist, Tatarka gradually developed into an uncompromised critic of the system. His book “The Daemon of Consent” (1963) was a scorching criticism of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. He left the communist party in protest against the communist politics after August 1968. Subsequently, he was expelled from professional associations, forbidden to publish and his books were withdrawn from official distribution. Until 1989, Tatarka could work only as a labourer and his work could be only spread in samizdat, or in exile. At that time, he became one of the most important Slovak dissidents and one of a few Slovak signatories to Charter 77. In 1986, the Charter 77 Foundation in Stockholm awarded him the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for his trilogy “Písačky”. Tatarka died in May 1989, only a few months before the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and official rehabilitation of his work. In 1991, he was awarded in memoriam the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Eight years later, he got the National Prize of the Slovak Republic. Since 1994, the “Dominik Tatarka Prize”, an annually literary award, has been awarded in Slovakia by the Milan Rastislav Štefánik Conservative Institute in cooperation with the Dominik Tatarka Prize jury and the Milan Šimečka Foundation. Today, Dominik Tatarka is considered to be one of the most influential representatives of the Slovak culture of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the most prominent Slovak dissidents.

Karel Teige was a Czech aesthetician, theoretician, art critic, graphic designer and translator. He was one of the leading figures in the interwar avant-garde. He studied aesthetics and art history at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in Prague from 1919 to 1923. In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as an art coordinator and editor for numerous Czechoslovak journals and newspapers. His writing focused on art theory, architecture, photography, film and theatre. He formulated the principles of the avant-garde aesthetic. In 1920 he co-founded the Devětsil art association, he was a member of the Left Front (1929–1936) and the Prague Surrealist Group (1934–1938). From 1929 to 1930, he was a guest senior lecturer at Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. He was also involved in art –  for example, in the design of collages. At the end of the 1930s, he criticized the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. After 1948 he was persecuted and could not officially publish. He was involved in the publication of the surrealist samizdat volume “The Signs of the Zodiac” (1951).

Modris Tenisons is a Latvian and Lithuanian artist who established the USSR’s first mime troupe. He directed several professional mime theatre and radio productions, such as Ecce homo (1967), Dream Dreams (1968), Do Butterflies (1969), 20th-Century Capriccio (1970), and Collage (1971).

After graduating from the School of Applied Arts in Riga (Latvia), Modris Tenisons studied and performed mime. In 1967, he moved to Soviet Lithuania. At first, he worked in Vilnius, and later in 1968 he moved to the Kaunas National Drama Theatre. Ecce Homo was the first performance he devised and showed in Kaunas. Later, in 1968, Jonas Jurašas, the director of the Kaunas National Drama Theatre, invited Tenisons’ troupe to join the production Mamutų medžioklė (The Mammoth Hunt). According to Jurašas, it was an interesting experiment, in which every 'real' personage-actor had his 'shadow' in Tenisons’ troupe. As Tenisons recalls, the production was well received by audiences.

Modris Tenisons and his troupe worked at the theatre for two years, and in 1970 moved to Kaunas Musical Theatre, where it worked until the middle of 1972. Tenisons witnessed the self-immolation of Kalanta, because he was rehearsing in Kaunas Musical Theatre at that moment. Later, mass youth protests broke out, but he decided not to join them, knowing the possible negative consequences of taking such a step. Although he kept away from the protests, it did not save him and his troupe from being closed down. After the self-immolation of Romas Kalanta in protest against the Soviet regime, Modris Tenisons and his troupe were dismissed from Kaunas Musical Theatre.

László Terray (1924–2015) was a Hungarian Lutheran clergyman. He was born in 1924 at Miskolc. He was consecrated by Lajos Ordass Lutheran bishop in 1946. With the scholarship of the Lutheran World Federation, he traveled to Norway, where he decided to stay because of his illness and the emerging communist dictatorship in Hungary. In 1954 he started to work at the Missionary Science Institute in Oslo. He was the president of the Norwegian Evangelical Missionary Council for ten years. In 1956 he helped 1500 Hungarian people to move to Norway. He was an important leader of the Professional Partnership of the Hungarian Evangelical Pastors Living in Abroad. He was managing editor of the Norwegian Ecclesiastic Mission’s radio programmes for almost 25 years. He organized the International Ordass Foundation and the Ordass Archive, and he wrote the first biography about Lajos Ordass in 1983.

Jan Tesař is a left-thinking historian who has been involved in the cultural opposition in Czechoslovakia and after his forced exile also in other countries. He was born in Skuteč on the 2^nd of June, 1933, and studied history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. In 1956–1958 and 1961–1969, he worked in the Military Historical Institute. In the meantime, he worked as an unemployed person for his own research, and in 1960 he briefly joined the Pardubice Museum. In 1966 he became a member of the Communist Party, but three years later he stepped out of it. In 1969, he was also arrested for the first time and imprisoned for more than a year, followed by additional arrests and imprisonments in 1972 and in 1979. Jan Tesař was the initiator and one of the founders of the VONS and the "spiritual father" of the regular meetings of Czech and Polish dissidents in Krkonoše. Since 1977 he has been co-publishing the period Dialogy. In 1980, Jan Tesař went into forced exile in Germany and then in France, where he dealt with publishing activities (such as Dialogy, Afgánský zápisník and texts for exile publishing houses) and he sought to coordinate political exile with other socialist countries too. After 1989, he participated in academic and political discussions. Currently, he lives in Slovakia.

Jan Tesař published a number of scholar books, in which he disputes with dominant historiographical interpretations and current myths of Czech/Czechoslovak history. His critical approach has a likeness which is present in the activities of dissents and exiles. His important works include Mnichovský komplex, Zamlčená diagnóza, Traktát o „záchraně národa“, Česká cikánská rapsodie.

Pavel Tigrid is one of the most distinguished Czech journalists of the 20th century. He was not only a writer and publicist, but also a publisher and politician, one of the most prominent representatives of Czechoslovak anti-Communist exile.

Pavel Tigrid, also known by the name Pavel Schönfeld, was born on October 27, 1917 in Prague to a middle-class assimilated Jewish family which was affiliated with writers Antal Stašek and Ivan Olbracht. Already as a student at lyceum, he worked as an editor for the Student Magazine, in which he published his first papers. During his studies, he set up a theatre group of youngsters with his friends where he directed an avant-garde performance. He fled to London in March 1939, where he worked as a broadcaster and editor of the BBC's Czech Broadcasting and editor of the Exile Government’s broadcast, “The Voice of Free Czechoslovakia”. In London, along with W. Bergr, he published Magazines Cultural Notebook and Review 42. After the end of Second World War, he returned to his homeland. In 1945, he briefly worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he met his future wife, Ivana Myšková, whom he married in 1947. He founded the weekly magazine Obzor with Ivo Ducháček and from 1946 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the weekly magazine for the young generation Development. In February 1948, he was on a reportage tour in West Germany, from which he never returned. Instead, State Security arrested his wife and didn’t release her for three months. After which, she managed to escape to her husband. Pavel Tigrid settled in Germany, where he co-founded the Czechoslovak Relief Committee for Refugees. In addition to this work to help political refugees, he was particularly engaged in journalism. Articles on the situation in Czechoslovakia were published in the German, English and French press. In Munich, he worked for the Free Europe Committee and participated in the preparation of Radio Free Europe broadcasting. He was the first program director of the Czechoslovak editorial office. He resigned in November 1952 after conceptual disagreements with Ferdinand Peroutka and moved to the United States. In 1956 he founded Testimony, an exile quarterly for politics and culture, which became the most important and prestigious magazine of Czech political exile. During the first years, they were located in New York. However, in 1960, Pavel Tigrid relocated to Paris, where he also transferred the quarterly Testimony. After 1968, Pavel Tigrid was deeply involved in the political and cultural dialogue of the afternoon and poster exile. Tigrid was a part of the foundation of many exile activities, among others, he was one of the founding members of the Czechoslovak Exile Documentation Centre of Independent Literature, whose collections are stored in the National Museum. Together with his wife, Ivana, he also organized effective help for representatives of the Czechoslovak opposition.

 He returned to Prague after the Velvet Revolution at the invitation of Václav Havel and then worked in his presidential office. From 1994 to 1996 he held the post of Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic. He was awarded a number of awards from 1995 as well as the Order of T. Masaryk. Until his death, he lived alternatively between France and Bohemia. He died on 31 August 2003 in his home in Héricy, near Paris.

Ivana Tigridova was a journalist and human rights activist, a life partner of the journalist, writer and most prominent representative of the anti-Communist exile of Pavel Tigrid. She was born in Prague on November 4^th, 1925 as Ivana Myšková, to a middle-class artistic family. Her grandmother from her mother's side was Terezie Brzková, one of the most prominent actresses of the First republic. Ivana Tigridová came from a Jewish family, so she had to leave English grammar school in Prague after the arrival of the Nazis. Her father was deported to Terezin first and then to Auschwitz, where he died in January 1945 on a death march. After the war, Ivana graduated from business School, on Resslova Street, where she managed to transfer after her dismissal from grammar school, and in a few months she completed her graduation at the Grammar School in order to take up Law at Charles University, which she did not complete.

In 1945 she met Pavel Tigrid, whom she married in February 1947. In 1947, Pavel Tigrid was followed by the Communist-controlled State Security, and should have been arrested on 23 February 1948. Tigrid was fortunate because he was abroad on a business trip. Ivana Tigridova was arrested shortly after the February 1948 coup and was imprisoned for three months. After her release, she soon escaped to her husband to Germany.

After leaving for emigration, they lived in Germany, where Pavel Tigrid built the Munich branch of Radio Free Europe and became its program director. Ivana began working with him in Radio Free Europe, working in the program department of the Czechoslovakian editorial office preparing the monitoring of the Czechoslovak press. In 1952, they relocated to New York and then to Paris in 1960, where Pavel Tigrid also transferred the quarterly Testimony Magazine, which he founded with his friends in 1956, and from which he became the most influential and successful Czechoslovak exile to start a magazine over time. His wife was also involved in his publishing.

 In the 1970s, Ivana Tigridová began to work more intensively on human rights issues. In November 1974, he founded the Help and Action organisation, supporting persecuted representatives of cultural and political opposition in the Eastern Bloc countries. After the establishment of Charter 77, the creation of an International Committee to Support the Charter 77 Principles in Czechoslovakia was launched in Paris, which helped the Charter 77 signatories in their efforts to implement human and civil rights in the country.

After 1989, Ivana often returned to Prague and helped her husband, who became Advisor to President Václav Havel and later Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic. Ivana Tigridová died on 27 June 2008 in Héricy, Paris, where she had lived with her family for many years.

Pavao Tijan was born in Senj in the Croatian Littoral on June 15, 1908. He was a Croatian political émigré, lexicographer, journalist and columnist. He attended primary and secondary school in his native Senj. He graduated with a degree in Slavic studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb in 1930. Initially, he worked in Vukovar as a private instructor for the Eltz family from 1931 to 1934. After that, he became a teacher of the Archdiocesan Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb (1935-1944). In 1938 he began working with Mate Ujević on the Croatian Encyclopaedia project as a member of its Central Committee and as Ujević's deputy chairman and secretary. After the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941, he started working in the Croatian Publishing and Bibliographic Institute (HIBZ). He contributed to various journals and magazines, such as Hrvatska prosvjeta, Obzor, and Jutarnji list, for a time he was editor of Hrvatski jezik and Književni tjednik and wrote for the cultural section of Spremnost. He also explored the cultural history of his native Senj and the Croatian coast. As the head of higher education and scientific institutions in the Education Ministry of the Independent State of Croatia, he particularly worked for the establishment of the Faculty of Medicine in Sarajevo in 1944.

He first went to Italy after 1945 to immigrate. Two years later he moved to Spain, where lived the rest of his life. In 1949, with a group of Croatian Catholic intellectuals in Madrid, he launched the journal Osoba i duh. As a university professor, he taught Slavic linguistics in Madrid at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones scientificias. Besides contributing to émigré journals such as Studia Croatica and Hrvatska revija, Tijan was editor of the Croatian program on Spanish National Radio for almost twenty years (1956-1975), where he reported from an anti-communist standpoint on social, political and cultural movements in Croatia under Yugoslav socialism. Likewise, in Spain as a technical editor, he participated in the encyclopaedia project on Spanish cultural history entitled Enciclopedia de la cultura española (1963-1968). He also translated many discussions and works from Croatian culture and literature into Spanish. Tijan died in Madrid on July 2, 1997.

His collection was created spontaneously during his lifetime as an émigré. As an anti-communist intellectual, he opposed the regime in Croatia and Yugoslavia, and considered his own work vital in order to destroy the communist ideology and regime in his country. Because of this commitment, he could only travel to Croatia in the 1990s after democratic changes. He arranged his collection at the end of his life because he wanted to move it to research and cultural institutions in Croatia, so it could serve future generations interested in exploring the history of Croatian anti-communism in the latter half of the 20^th century. His family eventually fulfilled his wish and transferred Tijan's collection to Croatia in 2006.

Viorel Virgil Tilea (b. 6 April 1896, Sibiu – d. 20 September 1972, London) was a Romanian diplomat and politician who distinguished himself during his time as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom from 1939 to 1940. Tilea was a descendant of the Raţiu family, which had become known for its members’ active involvement in the Transylvanian Romanians’ movement for civil and political rights in the nineteenth century. Upon graduating from high-school, he went on to study law at the University of Bratislava. In 1915, however, he had to interrupt his studies due to his conscription into the Austrian-Hungarian Army. After the Great War, he completed his studies at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna. In the context of Austria-Hungary’s disintegration, Tilea actively participated in the political mobilisation of Transylvanian Romanians. Thus, in October 1918, he joined the National Romanian Council which became the political representative of all Romanians living in Austria-Hungary. The Council sent him on diplomatic missions to Geneva and Paris. During the talks he tried to make sure that the decisions to be made at the Paris Peace Conference would be favourable to Transylvanian Romanians. In the first half of 1919, Tilea served as private secretary to Iuliu Maniu, one of the most revered Transylvanian Romanian political leaders. Then, from October to December 1919, he was private secretary to another Romanian politician of Transylvanian origin, Alexandru Vaida-Voevod, whom he accompanied to the Paris Peace Conference. In the autumn of 1919, he was appointed attaché at the Romanian Legation in London. He served in this capacity for two years.

In 1922, Tilea defended his doctoral dissertation entitled Rolul diplomației în politica de stat (The role of diplomacy in state policy) at the University of Vienna. Later, he continued to publish books in the field of diplomacy, such as Acţiunea diplomatică a României, nov. 1919 – mart. 1920 (Romania’s diplomatic activity, November 1919 – March 1920). From 1939 to 1940, Tilea served as Romania’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom. In March 1939, Romania found herself at the centre of a diplomatic incident known as the “Tilea Affair” after the minister sent on behalf of the Romanian government messages to the British government suggesting that Nazi Germany was planning to dismember Romania just as it had done with Czechoslovakia. Thus, he hoped to obtain from the British government guarantees regarding Romania’s territorial integrity. Subsequently, however, the Romanian government disavowed Tilea’s messages. His messages alarmed the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and ultimately contributed to Britain’s abandonment of its appeasement policy with regard to Nazi Germany. In the autumn of 1940, shortly after the establishment of the pro-German National Legionary State in Romania, Tilea was recalled, as he was deemed pro-British. However, he refused to return and asked for political asylum in the United Kingdom. After the establishment of the communist regime in Romania, Tilea became involved in organising the Romanian émigré community. According to the wishes expressed in his will, his memoirs Envoy Extraordinary: Memoirs of a Romanian Diplomat were finally published in 1998, twenty-six years after his passing. They contain valuable information on his activity as Romanian ambassador in London.

Éva-Edit Timkó (25 January 1925, Oradea – 25 June 2008, Cluj-Napoca) was a Hungarian artist from Transylvania. Her parents were art- and music-lovers. In the 1930s she attended the reputed Antalffy private ballet school in Oradea. During and after the Second World War, between 1942 and 1946, she was at the theatre of Oradea, and then between 1946 and 1947 at the Hungarian theatre of Arad as member of the operetta troupe under the management of Károly Jódy. In 1948 she signed as a ballet dancer with the newly formed Hungarian State Opera of Cluj, and already from the first season she featured in the soubrette roles of the operettas. She trained her voice one year with Ilona Adorján, and she improved her ballet knowledge with Roman Morawsky. She was exceptionally talented as singer, actress and ballet dancer.  Her artistic career spanned thirty theatre seasons, twenty two of which she spent on the stage of the Hungarian State Opera in Cluj. Even the tragedies that occurred in her private life were perhaps alleviated by the stage and by her love for music. To countless opera performances in Cluj in the so-called "golden age" years of the opera were added numerous tours and guest appearances. Her most played role was Stázi in Csárdáskirálynő (The Czardas Queen). The Hungarian State Opera of Cluj also took part in a tour of Yugoslavia in 1969 with the operetta Marica grófnő (Countess Marica). The success of the performance in Skopje was remembered by the journalist of Nova Makedonia, Vlado Čučkov, in his article “Művészi csúcsteljesítmény” (Artistic peak performance), in which he particularly highlighted the name of Edit Timkó.

Tirnanić attended the Tenth Belgrade High School, but did not graduate. He began his career as an editor in the Belgrade youth journal Susret.Tirnanić wrote for the weekly NIN, where healso worked as editor and later editor-in-chief, for two decades. He wrote for manyBelgrade-based publications, as well as for a number of television stations.

Bogdan Tirnanić co-authored the script for the film Poslednji krug u Monci [The Last Circle in Monza]. He starred in Rani radovi [Early Works] by Želimir Žilnik, Crnom bombaderu [The Black Bomber], Dečko koji obečava [The Promising Boy] and in Otpisani [The Written-Offs].

Tirnanić most important legacy was as a film critic, expert, and contemporary of Yugoslav Black Wave. His essays on the topic were published under the name Crni talas [Black Wave] in 2008.

Bogdan Tirnanić died in Belgrade on 16 January, 2009.