On Sunday, 1 March 2020, during the monthly meeting of Esperanto NSW, we had a special guest from Croatia: Damir Matašin, the great grand-nephew of John Matasin, whose hard work and generosity enabled the purchase of Esperanto House in the 1960s. Damir brought with him gifts, including a beautiful book on the history of the Esperanto movement in Bjelovar, Croatia, written by Josip Pleadin.
On the blank first page of the book was pasted a letter from the president of Bjelovar Esperantist Society, to Esperanto NSW.
The text, translated into English:
BJELOVAR ESPERANTIST DRUŠTVO
BJELOVARIAN EXPERANTIST SOCIETY
43000 BJELOVAR, Vlatka Mačeka 14, Croatia
Email: esperanto.bjelovar@gmail.com
To the esteemed
Esperanto Federation of New South Wales
143 Lawson St
Redfern, Sydney
Esteemed fellow-thinkers of Sydney,
We greet you from a Croatian town, Bjelovar, located in the area from which Ivan Matašin, who is known in Sydney as John Matasin, emigrated over 90 years ago. The merits of our fellow countrymen for the Esperanto movement in Sydney and Australia are immeasurable, but the most important is the purchase and care of your Esperanto house in Redfern. Although Ivan Matašin has never been a member of our society, which celebrated its 110th jubilee last year, he hails from our area, and we consider him a Croatian Esperantist, just as he was an Australian for many years of his life. In collaboration with Nicole Else and our member Josip Pleadin, many details of Matašin’s life were explored and his bibliography completed.
In 2019 we inaugurated the new house of Dokumenta Esperanto-Centro, the national Esperanto archive in our country, and ”the tradition of Esperanto in Croatia” has acquired the status of non-material cultural heritage. Several Australian Esperantists also contributed to the construction of the house of Dokumenta Esperanto-Centro, thus symbolically assisting the Croatian Esperanto movement in the same way that Matašin helped the Australian.
For that occasion, we published a comprehensive monograph on our jubilee. Although written in Croatian, we send it to your Federation for free as a symbolic sign of the unbreakable bonds that Ivan Matašin has made between us.
With sincere greetings,
Franjo Forjan
president
Bjelovar
30 January 2020