Who is your favourite detective? Do you lean towards the mercurial talents of the moustachioed Hercule Poirot, maybe the insistence of Columbo in asking about one more thing? What about Sherlock Holmes, Jessica Fletcher, or even the dynamic duo of McNulty and Bunk? Here at Croatia In Your Pocket, we’re partial to a non-fiction detective, and Croatian history contains one of the most influential and important names in the business.
The father of crime-scene investigation as we know it today, Hvar-born Ivan Vučetić is widely recognised as the initiator of dactyloscopy, or fingerprint identification. Born into a local family in 1858, Vučetić was a restless child. The son of a cooper, his education came to a resounding halt after primary school, as economic necessity forced the young man into the search for work. He followed in his father’s footsteps before joining the Austro-Hungarian Navy, leading the military orchestra in Pula. Vučetić may not have had a lengthy education, but that didn’t stop him; he read vociferously, devouring anything and everything he could and becoming a well-educated man in the process.
Vučetić left for Argentina at the age of 26 and went on to forge a career in the La Plata police department. After reading about the uniqueness of human fingerprints, he realised that they could be applied to criminal investigations. Although Vučetić initially had to defend his ideas against those who thought that fingerprinting could never be an exact science, his theories were put into practice after a grisly double-murder in 1892. The two children of a woman called Francisca Rojas had been slain, and Rojas (whose throat was cut) pointed the finger of blame at an estranged lover. A blood print suggested otherwise, and Vučetić used his burgeoning branch of detective science to discover the real murderer; Rojas herself. His findings were soon universally accepted by investigators around the globe.
There's a bust of Vučetić in the small park next to the Mandrać boat harbour (inscribed 'Ivan Vučetić "Foranin"', a local dialect word meaning "man from Hvar") and a mosaic portraying a huge fingerprint on the ground right next to it. Leaving Hvar on the road to Milna and Stari Grad, there's a mural of Vučetić adorning a kerb-side wall Ivan Vučetić Museum of Mystery. The remembrance continues in the capital, as a section of Zagreb’s Police Museum is dedicated to the great man. Here, visitors can learn all about the fingerprinting technique and even pose for their own mugshot. True crime is all the rage in the modern Netflix-world, and diving into the life and innovations of Ivan Vučetić is the perfect way to kickstart your own CSI-inspired mini-sleuthing career.
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