Serbian Bank in Zagreb

The Serbian Bank in Zagreb (Croatian: Srpska banka u Zagrebu) was a medium-sized bank in the Kingdom of Hungary and then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, established in 1895 and liquidated in 1945. It has been described as "the financial center of the Serbian irredentist movement".[1]: 3 

Former head office building of the Serbian Bank in Zagreb (1914), later head office of Hrvatska poštanska banka
Former head office of the Central Credit Institute in Novi Sad, acquired by the Serbian Bank in 1914
The Imperial Hotel in Dubrovnik, formerly owned by the Serbian Bank

History

The bank was founded on 3 April 1895 in Zagreb.[2] The initial capital was provided by ethnic-Serbian entrepreneurs in Croatia as well as Syrmia, Bačka and Banat, regions that were then all part of the Kingdom of Hungary.[3]: 132  Among the founders were Lazar Bačić, Vladimir Matijević, Bogdan Medaković, Livije Radivojević, and Jovan Živković, most of which were also associated with the creation of the Privrednik ethnic-Serbian business association in 1897. Kosta Taušanović, a political leader in the neighboring Kingdom of Serbia, was in Zagreb at the time and provided support for the bank's creation.[4]

In 1910, as political conditions did not allow it to maintain a branch in the Kingdom of Serbia, the Serbian Bank established the "Danubian Joint-Stock Company" (Croatian: Podunavsko - Trgovačko Akcionarsko Društvo) as its affiliate in Belgrade.[5] In 1914, it absorbed the Central Credit Institute (Serbian: Centralni Kreditni Zavod), another ethnic-Serbian bank in Novi Sad.[4] That same year, it moved to a prominently located office building near Ban Jelačić Square.

In the interwar period, it was one of the prominent joint-stock-banks based in Zagreb which formed the core of the Yugoslav commercial banking sector, together with the First Croatian Savings Bank, Croatian Discount Bank, Jugoslavenska Banka, Slavenska Banka, and Croatian-Slavonian Land Mortgage Bank. By 1924, it had branches in Dubrovnik, Knin, Mitrovica, Šibenik, Split, Sombor, and Subotica, in addition to Zagreb and Novi Sad.[6] That same year, the Danubian Joint-Stock Company merged with the Belgrade-based Adriatic Bank to form the Adriatic-Danubian Bank, in which the Serbian Bank was the reference shareholder.[7]: 37  The Serbian Bank owned prestige assets such as the Imperial Hotel and Lapad Hotel in Dubrovnik.[8][1]: 46 

In 1941, the Independent State of Croatia expropriated the owners of the Serbian Bank and had it renamed Commercial Industrial Bank (Croatian: Trgovačko industrialna banka) as a subsidiary of the newly empowered State Savings Bank (Croatian: Stedionica Nezavisne Drzave Hrvatske).[1]: 89, 95, 98  The bank was liquidated in 1945 together with the entire Yugoslavian commercial banking sector.[9]

See also

Notes
  1. Federal Reserve Board (February 1944), Army Service Forces Manual M355-5 / Civil Affairs Handbook Yugoslavia: Money and Banking, Washington DC: U.S. Army Service Forces
  2. "Štatuti Srpske banke u Zagrebu : osnovana 1895. godine". Pretraživa digitalna biblioteka.
  3. Mira Kolar-Dimitrijević (2018), The History of Money in Croatia 1527 – 1941, Zagreb: Croatian National Bank
  4. "Srpska banka u Zagrebu". Zapadni Srbi. 24 March 2018.
  5. Branko Hinić, Milan Šojić, and Ljiljana Đurđević (2009), Monetary Conditions in the Kingdom of Serbia (1884-1914) (PDF), National Bank of Serbia, p. 20{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. Ljubomir Stefan Kosier (1924), "L'Épargne : Son organisation, son progrès, ses institutions chez les Serbes, Croates et Slovènes" (PDF), Questions Balkaniques, Zagreb: Édition de l'Économiste Balkanique
  7. Svetlana Pantelic (2009), "Jadransko Podunavska Banka" (PDF), Bankarstvo
  8. "Srpska banka – od snažne i moćne, do zaboravljene srpske institucije". Prvrednik. 16 February 2022.
  9. Jouko J. Hauvonen (1970), Postwar Developments in Money and Banking in Yugoslavia (PDF), International Monetary Fund, p. 564


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