Španjolski Siget: Simbolika Alcázara u hrvatskim novinama
“SPANISH SIGET”: THE IMAGERY OF ALCÁZAR IN THE CROATIAN PRESS

Summary/Abstract: During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the propaganda battle waged in Spain and abroad between General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists and the Republicans, supported mainly by the Soviet Union, was nearly as imporatant as the fighting in the front lines. This article examines how the Croatian press depicted the siege of the Alcázar, one of the key battles during the first year of the conflict. The Croatian sympathizers of Franco tapped into the imagery, tropes, and collective memory of the Battle of Siget (1566) to depict the siege of the Alcázar as a modern version of that epic event. By blurring the lines between Croatia’s own past and the struggle in Spain, they ultimately sought to generate support for a more radical solution to Croatia’s national question that existed under the royal dictatorship during interwar Yugoslavia. Franco’s Nationalists, openly aided by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, increasingly served as a favorable model for certain circles of Croatian intellectuals. Comparisons between the Alcázar and Siget enabled the Croatian right to draw upon symbols and myths of the past to warn of a new danger to Western civilization – that is, both in Spain and Croatia – which took the form not of Turkish hordes, but of communists, socialists, and other political opponents on the left

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