Petar Kočić

Petar Kočić (; 29 June 1877 – 27 August 1916) was a Bosnian Serb writer, playwright, poet and politician. Born in rural northwestern Bosnia in the final days of Ottoman rule, Kočić began writing around the turn of the century, first poetry and then prose. While a student at the University of Vienna, he became politically active and began agitating for agrarian reforms within Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been occupied by Austria-Hungary following the Ottomans' withdrawal in 1878. Other reforms that Kočić demanded were freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, which had been denied to the province's inhabitants by Austria-Hungary.
In 1905, Kočić relocated to Skopje with his family, but was forced to return to Vienna after falling out with the local Serbian archimandrite. The following year, he and his family moved to Sarajevo, where Kočić became the general secretary of Prosveta (Enlightenment), a Serb cultural society. In 1906 and 1907, he led several demonstrations, including a general strike and a protest targeting a Croatian newspaper. The latter incident prompted the authorities to issue Kočić with an ultimatum, constraining him to leave Sarajevo or face arrest. He was arrested by the Austro-Hungarians in 1907 for publishing an anti-Habsburg tract in the newspaper Otadžbina (Fatherland), and sentenced to seven months' imprisonment. Further criticisms of the Austro-Hungarian administration in the newspaper resulted in his arrest and imprisonment on two subsequent occasions. He spent the majority of his imprisonment in solitary confinement, which caused him to slip into a deep depression.
Bosnia and Herzegovina was officially annexed by Austria-Hungary during Kočić's imprisonment. His sentence was commuted in early 1909, as part of a general amnesty. In 1910, Kočić successfully ran for a seat in the Bosnian Parliament (Sabor), whose creation had been approved by the Austro-Hungarians earlier that year. Kočić became the leader of what one historian describes as "the most uncompromising anti-Austrian Serb nationalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina". He lobbied for increased concessions to Bosnian Serb peasants and farmers, and advocated for various structural reforms, agitating against at the Austro-Hungarians, as well as the Bosnian Muslim landowning class, which had emerged from the Ottoman withdrawal largely unscathed. He left the Sabor in 1913, citing mental exhaustion. In January 1914, Kočić was admitted into a Belgrade mental hospital, where he died two years later, amid the destruction of World War I and the city's occupation by Austria-Hungary.
Kočić was one of the most important Bosnian Serb politicians of the Austro-Hungarian era, as well as one of the most important South Slavic playwrights of the 20th century. He was noted for his sharp wit and fiery temperament, which the Austro-Hungarian authorities frequently found themselves on the receiving end of. Kočić's works not only influenced an entire generation of Bosnian-Herzegovinian intellectuals, such as the future Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, but also the Serbian and Yugoslav nationalist movements, as well as the Bosnian autonomist and Yugoslav communist movements. Numerous streets in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia carry his name, and his likeness has appeared on Bosnian 100 KM banknotes since 1998.