Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on the occasion that a performance by young musicians at the ceremony sent a message of art and the power of enlightenment. This is the key message of friar Didak, who educated about 13,000 adults and saved 17,000 hungry children during the First World War, which remains a lasting memory of his great work, said Plenković.
We recall, he added, his role in difficult times and his strength and perseverance to overcome a number of challenges and seek solutions that at that time seemed almost impossible.
The international cultural-scientific-spiritual event Didak's Days was launched in honour of the benefactor and educator friar Didak Buntić, and this year it is the 20th anniversary of the event.
Friar Didak Buntić (1871-1922) was a Herzegovinian Franciscan and provincial superior, a public benefactor, educator, politician and one of the most influential people in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the beginning of the 20th century. In the years of great famine at the end of the First World War, he saved 17,000 children by collecting aid for the hungry and taking children from Herzegovina and the Dalmatian Zagora to the fertile regions of Slavonia and Srijem, where benefactors temporarily took them in.
Through his mass literacy programmes, from 1910 to 1917, about 20,000 people learned to read and write. He also devised a program of economic, infrastructural and cultural reconstruction of Herzegovina. He was extremely attached to Zagreb, where he received support for his projects, and where in 1919 he opened a dormitory for the education of poor talented students.