Friday, February 8, 2013


Giacomo Scotti complaint about the "croatization" of Italian literature in Venetian Dalmatia ( prompted me to do a research about the disappearance of the neolatin people in the territories that were part of romanized Illyria .... and I found many interesting and unsuspected things.

One of these is the neo-Latin origins of one of the greatest scientific geniuses of the last centuries: Nicola Tesla.

We all know that Tesla was born in Lika (today's Croatia) from a Serbian Orthodox family and was considered the only "super-genius" in the world of the defunct Yugoslavia. Even today, the Croats and the Serbs praise him, fighting between them for his ethnicity in a way sometimes harshly.

But the fact that his genius shines "alone" in these Yugoslavian lands, has led me to doubt about his origins. In fact, usually a super-genius appears in a society surrounded by a group of other clever individuals like him (as has happened for many centuries in France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany, etc. ...), who are affected by personal good education/instruction together with favorable food supply and consistent socio-economic development. In fact, Galileo-to cite one Italian example- came out not from a community of medieval peasants of Sardinia (with all due respect to them, of course), but was the result of Renaissance Tuscany.

Then I started to do related research and to my surprise I found the following:

“………..Nikola Tesla was born in Croatia, which at that time, lay within Austro-Hungary.He was born in Smijani, near Gospiae, Lika (the Krajina, a military district of Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Croatia).Tesla was baptized in the Old Slavonic Church rite. His Baptism Certificate reports that he was born on June 28th, (Julian calendar; July 10 in the Gregorian calendar), and Christened by the Serb Orthodox priest, Toma Oklobd’ija. It is interesting to note that HE WAS A SERBIAN, OF VALACHIAN DESCENT.Tesla was proud of his Croatian motherland and Serbian descent. When his mother died in 1892, he paid a visit to Croatian capital Zagreb, and gave a lecture about alternating current. On that occasion Tesla said: “As a son of my homeland, I feel it is my duty to help the city of Zagreb in every respect with my advice and work” - (in serbian: “Smatram svojom duznoscu da kao rodeni sin svoje zemlje pomognem gradu Zagrebu u svakom pogledu savjetom i cinom”). Nikola Tesla, besides being a great inventor and an outspoken Serbian patriot, had sincerely adored the free Serb states, Serbia and Montenegro. He had never hidden his patriotic feelings, on the contrary, he stressed them. One of Tesla’s proudest moments was when he was granted his United States citizenship…….” Frank German

From this excerpt it can be deduced that the super-genius Tesla was Croatian only by birth and was Serbian only by language and religion ...... but his ethnic ancestry (we dare to say "by chromosome") was Wallachian, or neo-Latin! Romanian scholars Naicu and Ciutacu, confirm it ( ).

Moreover, his paternal great-great-grandfather had the surname "Draghici" (a typical Wallachian surname,  especially in Romania's Banat), but his great-grandfather, who was initially a carpenter, changed it to "Tesla" (in Romanian 'ax' is said 'teslea'): this surname "Draghici" (in Serbian it is said "Draganici") was quite common among the Morlachs of Lika. And we all know that the Morlachs are originally neo-Latin peoples of the Dinaric Alps, who were mainly 'croatized' after the tenth century (read for further details my "I neolatini delle Alpi Dinariche" written a few months ago: ).

Nicola Tesla was "Vlah" (as Slavs call these neolation populations) from his father's family but even from his mother's family! Indeed the mother of Nicola Tesla was called Mandici and her family was originally from the area of Durmitor (Vlach name meaning "dormitory") in northern Montenegro/western Serbia. This lady Mandici (with a clear romance surname!) is now called "Mandic" (typical Slovenisation, sic!) on  almost all the books on Tesla ...... But the most interesting thing is that the mother of Tesla had a prodigious memory and an intelligence very bright, according to all the biographers (, although she was illiterate as almost all the women in this region and in these decades.

In other words, the super-genius Nicola Tesla seems to have inherited the intelligence of his mother in a superlative way: he was a member of the Mandici, a Vlach family that traded in the late Renaissance with the merchants of the Republic of Venice (and maybe was related to Venetians with some marriage) and that lived in a region still today called "Stari Vlah" (literally in Serbian-Croatian that means "historical Wallachia") bordering the "Romanija" of Bosnia ( ). Currently in Romanija there it is even a village named Mandici, not far away from Sarajevo.

In conclusion, the supergenius Tesla can be considered neo-Latin because of his evident Wallachian origins. Obviously Nicola Tesla was assimilated into the Serbian Orthodox world in language and religion and considered himself Croatian because born in Lika (Croatia), but his genius came from his Morlach ethnicity (that was originally neo-Latin) And his genius reminds the scientific genius of Galileo, Leonardo and Marconi, to name a few Italians, not the one of the Serb-Croatian peasants .....

Moreover Heny Coanda, a scientist who was personally acquainted with Tesla, said he had a neo-Latin appearance and did not looked like a slav (in fact Nicola Tesla in the picture above looks like a typical Venetian citizen, as many I have known myself with very similar appearance in the Veneto). Coanda even wrote that Tesla spoke in "Istro-Romanian": I invite the reader to read  (unfortunately in Romanian) about this language knowledge. How could Nicola Tesla speak a language (the Istro-Romanian) that was not taught in school in those years and that was only spoken by a few thousands people in Istria and in nearby Lika? Of course, only if he had learned it from his family as a child ....

And we cannot forget that a Romanian academic, Professor Moraru, says in one of his publications specifically that the "Province Lica was locuita compact de Istrian-românii morlaci, Inca din sec. XV-XVI "(the province of Lika was compactly inhabited by istroromanians/morlachs, from the XV/XVI centuries) and that Nicola Tesla "a fost istroroman" (was istroromanian): Lika in the maps of the late Renaissance was identified with the "Morlacchia Major" - , and was populated mainly by morlachs who later moved to the island of Krk/Veglia and in Istria (where they received the name istroromanians).

Moreover, the young Nicola Tesla did not know the ethnical existence of the istroromanians (studied in detail only at the end of the nineteenth century -, as happened with the Dalmatian Italians "discovered" academically by Bartoli only in 1906) and so he identifyed himself , when emigrated into the United States in 1884, with the only ethnicity of his lands known by everybody in those years, the Serbo-Croatian: when Romanian scholars contacted him in the early twentieth century and explained to him that he was of istroromanian roots, he showed amazement ..... and chose -in doubt- not to comment on that matter! In other words: NICOLA TESLA HAS NEVER DENIED HIS POSSIBLE ISTROROMANIAN ORIGINS. In his many writings (and declarations) he has always said that he considered himself to be serbo-croatian, but he never mentioned his istroromanian roots while denying these origins. And additionally, according to Moraru, Nicola Tesla could speak in istroromanian since attending elementary school .... which leaves us with some question marks: was he "conditioned" or "forced" not to admit his wallachian/istroromanian origins?

Finally it should be noted that Nicola Tesla was born in a village about ten kilometers from the coast of the "Morlacca Canal" in the Adriatic sea, and the area was inhabited by Dalmatian Italians in the centuries immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire (until the thirteenth century one of the main towns of Lika was called "Rmanj", and even today there is a small monastery there). Not only that, but for several decades, the area also belonged to the Republic of Venice: Karlobag/Carlopago (the Roman Vegium, in the area of Senia/Segna where many Roman colonists had settled in the time of Augustus - is located only 20 km from where Tesla was born and was a fortified center of Venice where some venetian families settled during the centuries of venetian Dalmatia ( ).

Moreover, the great-grandfather of Tesla could have taken his surname from the Roman town "Tesleum" (current Kosinj - ..., page 22), that existed until the Middle ages just 5 km north of Smiljan, the village where was born Nicola. The area around Tesleum was totally romanized when the Croats arrived there in the late VIII century and the archeologists found only a few slav tombs there (meaning that the area remained mainly populated by the autochtonous romanized dalmatian/illyrians at least until the XI century).

So, from the previous considerations we can say that Tesla had definitely some Italian blood in his veins, not only the wallachian/morlach one of his ancestors, and his super-genius could be directly connected (by "heredity" at the chromosomal level) with one of the many scientific geniuses appeared in the Italian peninsula, from Syracusan Archimedes to Roman Fermi.

Indeed he is the only super-genius between serbocroats (no other in Croatia and Serbia is or was like him) and this simple reality confirms indirectly that his origins are not slav, but Italian-wallachian (furthermore, he was born in an area bordering the so called "Italian Dalmatia", and Lika was claimed even by Italian irredentists after WWI).  In fact, his "intelligence" and genius were evidently the same that appeared among many Italian superbrains in the last centuries: Nicola Tesla was a neo-Latin genius.