Jurij Dalmatin (ca. 1547, Krško or nearby – 1589, Ljubljana), a Protestant priest and the author of the first complete translation of the Holy Scripture into Slovene (Wittenberg, 1584), did not enter history with an inherited family name, but one that he assumed on his own, signing himself in the humanist manner of his time as Dalmatinus. The contribution analyses the hypothesis that he came from a Dalmatian family. Rather than one of his Dalmatian ancestors having immigrated to the town of Krško as a craftsman or trader, it seems much more likely that on his paternal side Dalmatin descended from a family of Croatian refugees who colonised the Krško field fleeing from the Turks. In his time, Dalmatia was a significantly wider geographical area, extending in the north as far as the Kolpa River. Contrary to the belief that all children of Dalmatin, who married the daughter of a citizen of Ljubljana, died at a tender age, it turned out that at least two of his daughters reached adulthood and married and that his widow remarried. There are also five known Dalmatin’s grandsons, and the entire family converted to Catholicism during the process of CounterReformation.
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