Vasilije Krestić

Who is Vasilije Krestić?

Vasilije Krestić is an intellectual and historian, and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

As a historian, he focuses on the history of the Serbs of the Habsburg Monarchy. In his early career, Krestić wrote about the history of Croatia before and after the Nagodba of 1868, with special reference to the Serbs of Croatia and in Hungary. He has written numerous articles on related subjects.

In the mid-1980s Krestić became involved in the politics of nationalist opposition to communism in Serbia. He became a voice of discontent regarding the status of the Serbs of Croatia and helped to revive Serbian nationalism. He was one of the leading authors of the 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which was a founding document in the creation of the Serbian nationalist movement of the 1980s. Krestić was responsible for the sections that described the Serbs of Croatia as suffering genocide in that Yugoslav republic. Nationalist professors led by Krestić removed Dr. Drago Roksandić from the University of Belgrade in 1989, causing nine professors to publish an open letter in defence of Roksandić in the March 1990 issue of The New York Review of Books.