Miljenko Smoje

Miljenko Smoje (14 February 1923 – 25 October 1995, Split). After graduating from the Teaching School, he worked as a teacher in Komiža and Omiš, and in 1948 he started working as a journalist and editor in Slobodna Dalmacija. He launched and edited the satirical paper Pomet, later a supplement of Slobodna Dalmacija. In addition to Slobodna – where he spent almost his entire working life, forever remaining the biggest name in the history of the newspaper – he was also and employee of Radio Split for a while, occasionally collaborating with numerous other newspapers. In addition to Hajduk’s monograph Hajdučka legenda (1971), in the 1970s and 1980s, Smoje also wrote stage plays, as well as scripts for film and television, and the series Naše malo misto and Velo misto brought him the greatest popularity. He published both scripts as novels. Writing his distinctive humorous feuilletons for decades, he deciphered the mentality of Split and Dalmatia, defined their identity and legitimised the spoken language of the common people by introducing it into the mass media, creating a work unique in the entire history of Croatian journalism and literature. A smaller part of this enormous material was published in Dalmatinska pisma (1976), Libar Miljenka Smoje (1981) and Dnevnik jednog penzionera (1981), as well as the posthumously published collection of travelogues and reports Skitam i pitam (2013). He wrote his last essays for Feral Tribune, and a selection of these texts was collected in the book Pasje novelete (1996).