One of the most famous Croatian pop artists, Vice Vukov, passed away last night at the Special Hospital for Lung Diseases on Rockefeller Street in Zagreb, after nearly three years in a coma following a fall on the stairs of the Croatian Parliament in November 2005.
Vice Vukov was born on August 3, 1936, in Šibenik. He obtained a degree in philosophy and Italian language and literature from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, and also graduated from the Institute for High International Studies in Paris. His singing career peaked in the 1960s and early 1970s, when he won all the major Croatian festivals and represented the former Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Famous songs such as "Your Country", "Bokeljska Night", "Letter to Dad", "Dalmatian Elegy", "Put the Lantern in the Window", and many others have somehow become part of the national heritage. However, at the height of his career during the Croatian Spring, Vukov ended up on the blacklist of the fifty most prominent figures from the Croatian mass movement (MASPOK), which forced him to leave Croatia.
He returned to Zagreb from Paris in 1976, and although he got a job at the Publishing Institute of Matica hrvatska, his performances were prohibited until 1989. His return to the pop scene was crowned with as many as 14 sold-out concerts at the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall. Vice Vukov held his last concert in 2005, shortly before his unfortunate fall in the Parliament building, where he entered as an independent representative on the SDP list in 2003. (H)
