Argentina will face Croatia this Tuesday (13) in the semifinals of the Qatar 2022 World Cup against Croatia, a country that appears in the family tree of the greatest legend of Alviceleste football, Diego Maradona, who had a great-grandfather from that region of Europe.
“They say that my ancestors lived nearby, I came to see if they left me any inheritance”, joked Maradona himself during a visit to Novi Vinodolski (north of Croatia) to participate in a charity soccer match in 2005 with tennis figures such as McEnroe and Goran Ivanisevic, and football greats from the Balkan country, such as Davor Suker and Zvonimir Boban.
To get to these ancestors, it is necessary to go back to the figure of Matej Karolic, born in 1847 in a place in present-day Croatia, then belonging to the Austrian Empire.
It is estimated that his birthplace could be the island of Korcula (southern Croatia), but according to a recent article in Caras magazine, Matej Karolic’s baptismal certificate would place his origin in Praputnjak, near Rijeka (north). .
The rest of the story leads to Argentina, the country where Matej Kariolic emigrated at the age of 25, whose name was changed in records at the time to Mateo Cariolich.
Installed in Corrientes, he married Trinidad Ferreyra in 1875 and from this union eight children were born. The youngest, Salvadora, was Diego Maradona’s maternal grandmother.
Salvadora and her husband, Atanasio, had Dalma Salvadora Franco in 1929, who went down in history under the nickname Doña Tota and who was the mother of Diego Maradona, born in 1960 in Villa Fiorito (Buenos Aires) and died in 2020 at age 60 .
The match against Croatia is, therefore, in a way, another nod to Maradona’s omnipresence in the World Cup, a tournament in which he definitively established himself, leading his team to its second and last world title, in Mexico in 1986.
A long history of immigration
The migratory flow from Croatia to Argentina is less documented than most of Italy or Spain, but it had some relevance.
The records and numbers are difficult to establish since Croatia was integrated into other entities such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Yugoslavia, which in many cases made it difficult to trace the data in the records. However, according to Croatian government estimates, there could be around 250,000 people of Croatian origin in Argentina today.
The beginnings of the migratory flow date back even before independence from the Spanish Crown, with punctual arrivals such as that of the Jesuit Nikola Plantic (Nicolás Plantich in his record when he arrived in Argentina) to teach at the University of Córdoba in the mid-18th century.
In the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the migratory flow increased, as well as in the period between the wars.
Among the descendants of Croats in Argentina, there are prominent names in the sport besides Maradona, such as Daniel Orsanic, captain of the Alviceleste team that won the only Davis Cup in the history of Argentine tennis, in 2016, precisely against Croatia in Zagreb.
On that weekend in November 2016, when Juan MartÃn Del Potro and Federico Delbonis commanded the Salad Bowl, Maradona himself was supporting in a box at the Arena Zagreb, when he received the news of the death of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he the legendary 10 described at the time as his “second father”.
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