The Visitors

Rijeka (Croatia)

With 129.000 inhabitants, Rijeka is the third largest city of Croatia and its major harbour. The Roman settlement Tarsatica gave the name to Trsat, a hill above the modern city which hosts the famous Medieval Franciscan monastery and attracts pilgrims to Our Lady Sanctuary. In its turbulent history, Rijeka belonged to Austria, Hungary, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Croatia: in the early 1920s, it even existed as an independent state. Rijeka was the birthplace of torpedo, constructed by Ivan Blaž Lupis Vukić and Robert Whitehead and manufactured since 1866. The city's monuments – the churches of St. Mary's Assumption, St. Sebastian, and St. Hieronimus, the Capuchin church of Our Lady of Lourdes, the sinagogue, the mosque, the Old Town with the Roman arch and mosaic, St. Vitus' Cathedral, the Governor's, Municipal, and Archduke Joseph's palaces, etc.,have been visited by Guglielmo Marconi, Benito Mussolini, Ernesto Che Guevara, and many other historical figures.
 

University of Rijeka (since 1973.)

Spread all over the city and encompassing 10 faculties, 1 academy, 4 university departments, a science and techonolgy park, and other units, the University developed from a Jesuit grammar school established in the 17th century. Today, the new modern University campus is being constructed in the Trsat area.

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Have you known?

• the first public midwifery school in Croatia was founded in Rijeka (in 1786, by Giacomo Cosmini and  Giovanni Carrobi);
• Ivan Dežman (1841–1873), physician and writer, published the Vocabulary of Medical Terms (in 1868) in Rijeka;
• Emergency First Aid Service was founded in Rijeka in 1882, a year before the one in Vienna;
• in February 1896, only a month after Röntgen's discovery, the first X-ray scan in Croatia was obtained by the physicist Peter Salcher, a professor at Rijeka Navy Academy and a collaborator of Ernst Mach at ultra-fast photography research (Salcher was the first in the world to photograph a gun bullet in flight);
• the vacuum extractor for babies was invented in Rijeka in 1952, by ViktorFinderle(1902–1964);
• Valter Rukavina(1896–1972), professor of infectology at Rijeka Faculty of Medicine, wrote Maltese Feaver in Istria and became the WHO expert for brucelosis;
• in Opatija near Rijeka, Leo Henryk Sternbach (1908-2005) was born, the inventor of Valium;
• in Rijeka lived, worked, and died Franjo Kresnik (1869-1943), „The Man Who Can Read Violins,“ physician and violin maker;
• the first kidney transplantaion in Croatia was performed in Rijeka in 1971 by Vinko Frančišković, Šime Vlahović, and collaborators.