Idajevo

New to me, and to the blog roll:

Sarajevo Photoblog -
Photos from Sarajevo, the ones that you usually do not see.

Beautiful.

Thanks to the Montana Sedition Project, Governor Brian Schweitzer has granted posthumous pardons to 78 persons convicted of sedition during the First World War.

One of them was Croatian, or as he may have called back then, "Slavonian." He might even have been listed as "Austrian" for the empire which occupied his home country.

He was Martin Ferkovich (Ferković). He was a miner, and had been in Montana for 14 years. His "crime" was to give voice to his feelings about being drafted into the army. He said,

"I would kill the first man who tried to take me. Austria is my country and I won't fight against her. I wouldn't shoot my own brother. I would shoot someone else first. The Government didn't do right; they didn't give me my citizenship papers. The Kaiser is all right; he didn't bother me. The Kaiser didn't bother this country."

He offended his neighbors so much with his k. und k. - style moustache that they removed it - forcibly one assumes. He grew it back:

Sentencing judge George V. Jones later said he had a very poor impression of Ferkovich as defiant and peculiarly un-American because he aped the airs of the Kaiser in the way he wore his mustache (which he evidently grew back after it was shaved off by the citizens of Musselshell).

He served 33 months, and was Montana's last sedition prisoner. Where might his descendants be?