Milan Stanislav Ďurica

Milan Stanislav Ďurica (13 August 1925 – 25 January 2024) was a Slovak historian, Salesian priest and Catholic theologian.

Biography
Milan Stanislav Ďurica was born in Krivany, Czechoslovakia on 13 August 1925.

Church career
Ďurica became a member of the Salesian order on 14 August 1944 and became ordained a priest on 1 July 1956. As a theologian, Pope John XXIII appointed him as adviser of the Preparatory Commission of Second Vatican Council.

Academic career
Ďurica began his academic career in 1956, as professor of Theology at the Salesian Theological College in Abano Terme. He achieved a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1961 at University of Padua. In 1967 he became professor of political and constitutional history of Eastern European countries at the same university, where he was also Slovak language lecturer. In 1969 he founded the Eastern European Studies Centre (Centro di Studi sull'Europa Orientale) in Padua. He founded and edited Il Mondo Slavo, the yearbook of the Institute of Slavic Philology at the University of Padua.

From 1993 Ďurica served as professor of church history at the Cyril and Methodius Theological Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava. He retired from teaching in 1997.

As a historian, Ďurica mainly concentrated on modern history of Slovakia and on the history of First Slovak Republic. His most successful book, Dejiny Slovenska a Slovákov (History of Slovakia and the Slovaks), remains controversial among Slovak historians and politicians, although it is the best-seller of Slovak history books. Indeed, despite some appreciation for his work on documents from Italian archives, not accessible to other Czechoslovakian historians during the communist regime, he was criticised as an "ultranationalist".

Bibliography of Ďurica's works represents 1,700 publications, issued in eight languages. For its scientific and cultural activity he was made Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1995. The Accademia Teatina per le Scienze in Rome awarded him the title of Honorary Academician. In 1991 the Minister of Culture of Slovakia Ivan Hudec appointed him as the first director of the Slovak Historical Institute in Rome (the institute was later closed and re-founded in 2001).

Ďurica also contributed to the first translation into Slovak language of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Ugo Foscolo.

Death
Ďurica died in Bratislava on 25 January 2024, at the age of 98.

Reception
Ďurica was criticized for his attempts to rehabilitate the wartime Slovak State and its president, Jozef Tiso, whose actions resulted in the deaths of some 70,000 Jews during the Holocaust in Slovakia. Ďurica claimed that Tiso used the power of presidential exemption for Jews to save 35,000 Jews from his regime's own antisemitic policies. According to American historian James Mace Ward and other scholars, evidence for the number of exemptions issued is "straightforward and indisputable": only about 650 exemptions covering 1,000 Jews were issued prior to the end of deportations in 1942, and three-quarters of these Jews were covered by other exemptions. A controversial textbook written by Ďurica presented Tiso and his colleagues as "saviours of the Jewish population" and implied that Jews drafted for forced labour had it better than the non-Jewish Slovak population. The textbook was harshly criticized by historians and later retracted.

External links and sources

 * Milan Stanislav Ďurica, www.osobnosti.sk
 * I. Kamenec, Spor o Ďuricovu knihu (Dilema, okt. 1997, str. 23–26)
 * Interview with Milan S. Ďurica, (Don Bosco dnes, č. 2, 2001, s. 21–23)