Dr. Josif Pancic

Academician Dr. Josif Pančić

Josif Pančić was born on April 5, 1814 in the small town of Ugrina near Bribir, in today's Croatia, as Josip. The Pančićs are originally from Herzegovina, and since ancient times they moved to that village, which is located on the northern slopes of Velebit. Josip was the fourth of five children of Pavel and Margarita. His parents, like the rest of the inhabitants of his native region, lived a hard life, they were farmers, cattle breeders and winegrowers, which certainly influenced the fact that Pančić fell in love with nature in his early childhood and felt the unbreakable connection between man and it. Uncle Grgur, who was the parish priest in Gospić, took care of Josip's education. Pančić finished elementary school in Gospić and high school in Rijeka. In the then sixth-grade high school, Josip acquired solid knowledge of Latin and German, and taught himself French and Italian. After finishing high school in 1830, he continued his education at the Regia Academica Scientiarum high school in Zagreb, at the Faculty of Philosophy. Since natural sciences were poorly represented at that faculty, in 1832 he transferred to the Faculty of Medicine in Pest, where natural sciences were also taught. In addition to other subjects, Pančić attended lectures in botany, at the then famous botanist Sadler. Although he was a doctor by training, those lectures influenced him to choose a topic in botany for his doctoral dissertation under the title Taxilogia botanica, which he dedicated to his benefactor, Uncle Grgur. He wrote his dissertation in Latin, and it was also his first scientific work. He was promoted to doctor of medicine on September 7, 1843. In Pest, he learned both Hungarian and English, and gave private lessons in French and Italian. After his studies, he worked in the surroundings of Buda, privately as a doctor. He then spent two years in the Banat in the small mining town of Ruksberg as a tutor, educator and doctor for two wealthy families. During his vacation, he visited the wider region, studied and collected various plant species. He studied rocks and minerals in the mines. Returning to his native region, he visited the areas of Velebit and its surroundings and collected a lot of plant material. Considering that there was no necessary literature for the determination of plant species at that time, Pančić went to Vienna in 1845, with the blessing of his uncle, to study the collected plant material in the famous Museum of Natural History. He arranged his herbarium and regularly attended the lectures of the famous botanist Endler. He stayed in Vienna for a year.

Among others, he met Vuk Karadžić in Vienna. According to his advice, he came to Belgrade in May 1846. In anticipation of employment in Užice, Pančić explored the wider area of ​​Belgrade, walked the slopes of Avala and collected plants for his herbarium. Intending to leave Serbia, due to not getting a job, he received an invitation from Avram Petronijević, the then minister and owner of a glass factory in the vicinity of Jagodina, to work as a doctor to combat typhoid fever. Pančić was in that position for half a year. Working in that area, he became familiar with the flora of Jagodina and its surroundings. The inhabitants loved Pančić as a conscientious doctor and a good man, and in February 1847 he was appointed part-time doctor and physicist of the Jagodina district. He continued his research into the flora of the area, and managed to visit the peaks of Rtanj, Ozren, and the surrounding spa. At the end of the year, he was transferred to Kragujevac to the position of district physician physicist. During his stay in Jagodina, Pančić also visited Ćuprija, where he met Ljudmila, the daughter of engineer Koron, whom he then begged as a doctor in Kragujevac. In January 1849, they got married in the Orthodox church in Ćuprija. They had seven children. With his dedicated work, he drew attention to himself, and at the beginning of the following year, on January 8, 1850, he became a corresponding member of the Society of Serbian Literature. In 1851, he visited the Kopaonik mountain for the first time, to which he returned several times due to its beauty and inspiration. In 1853, he was appointed as a professor of natural sciences at the Belgrade Lyceum, first under contract and then, a year later, as a full professor. Pančić received Serbian citizenship in April 1854, and most likely then he changed his name from Josip to Josif. In the Lyceum, and later in the Great School, Pančić worked until the end of his life and educated many generations of students. He taught botany, zoology, mineralogy with geology and agronomy, and later meteorology and physical geography. With his scientific opus, he gained a great domestic and international reputation. He was the first rector of the Great School in Belgrade (1866), today's Belgrade University, and he was elected to that position six times. In 1870 and 1871, he was a deputy and vice president of the Assembly of Serbia. By royal decree, on the proposal of the Minister of Education, in April 1887, Pančić was appointed the first president of the Royal Serbian Academy (today the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts - SANU).

In the course of his scientific research work (tireless naturalistic investigations of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and the former Austria-Hungary), he published 26 scientific works in the field of botany, four important works in the field of zoology and about twenty other professional and popular articles. Apart from the flora of Serbia and the surrounding countries, Pančić also studied fish, insects, molluscs, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. With dedicated and thorough work, Pančić became the best connoisseur of the nature of this region at that time. In the field of teaching activities, he wrote four textbooks for elementary and high school students: Elementary School Physics, Mineralogy with Geology, Botany and Zoology. For the scientific research opus, Pančić's discoveries of 193 plant taxa, new to science, are the most significant, among them are 131 by the Italian botanist Roberto Viziani. Together they wrote and printed in Venice a monolithic and capital work - Plantae sebicae rariores aut novae, Decas I (1862), Decas II (1866), Decas III (1870). In 1997, the Institute for Textbooks in Belgrade published the Collected Works of Josif Pančić in eleven volumes. Pančić's most famous botanical discovery is certainly the unique conifer spruce tree - Picea omorika (Pančić). Foreign authors called it Serbian spruce, and Pančić "ice beauty". It grows naturally around the middle course of the Drina River in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (the part between Višegrad and Bajina Bašta, Viogor Mountain and Radomišalj) and next to the Mileševka River near Prijepolje (Ravnište). A new plant species, 47 new varieties and seven new forms. In addition to the plant species, Pančić discovered and described two grasshoppers, new to science, one from the Rila mountain area in Bulgaria, and the other from the Tara mountain in western Serbia. In addition, he was considered a great pedagogue. He was very persistent in his work, systematic, modest. He respected and loved his students and often told them: "Work is life, and work is duty". Chronologically, the most important works of Dr. Josif Pančić stand out: Taxilogia botanica, Dissertatio inauguralis medica, Pest (1842), Flora in the Belgrade area (1845), List of wild flowers that grow in Serbia, with a description of some new species (1856), Fishes in of Serbia (1860), Essentials for students of the Great School, I-II, Belgrade (1864-1868), Saffron (1865), Birds in Serbia (1867), Kopaonik and its foothills (1869), Material for the fauna of the Principality of Serbia (1869) , Forest trees and shrubs in Serbia (1871), Flora of the Principality of Serbia (1874), Eine neue Conifere in den ostlischen Alpen (1876), Material for the flora of the Principality of Bulgaria (1883), Orthoptera in Serbia (1883), Supplement to the flora of the Principality of Serbia ( 1884), Omorika a new genus of conifers in Serbia (1887), and many others. Pančić's first works on the plants of Serbia were published in cooperation with the famous Pančić also discovered many other species with exceptional botanical features, above all two endemic and relict plants from the genus Ramonda (Ramonda serbica and Ramonda nathaliae), as well as a whole series of other plants. He searched for spruce for almost two decades. He found it in the village of Zaovine, in the hamlet of Đurići, on August 1, 1875, and the discovery was published in German in an article entitled "A new conifer in the Eastern Alps". Omorika, which is an endemic and relict of the Balkans from the Ice Age, was considered by Pančić to be a type of pine (Pinus omorika), and a little later naturalist Purkina transferred it to the spruce genus, and its Latin name is Picea omorika Pančić (Purk.). He published a detailed description of the spruce in 1887 in the publication Omorika nova fela conifera u Serbia. The significance of the discovery of Pančić's spruce is that it represents an endemic species of our region.

The genus Ramonda has three species, two of which grow in the Balkans, and one in the Iberian Peninsula. The genus was first discovered in the Pyrenees in 1831, thanks to the French researcher Ramond, after whom the entire genus was named. In 1874, Pančić discovered the Serbian ramonda (Ramonda serbica) on Rtanj and in the Sićevačka Gorge, and a decade later, in 1884, Dr. Sava Petrović, the court physician of King Milan Obrenović, found a third species in the Jelašnica Gorge, which he and Dr. Josif Pančić described it under the name Natalija's ramonda (Ramonda nathaliae), in honor of Queen Natalija Obrenović. Knowing how important material evidence is in the natural sciences, as well as practical teaching, Pančić also worked on the establishment of a botanical garden. Immediately after being appointed as a professor of the Lyceum, he planted the first plants in the courtyard of the Lyceum, which at the time housed Princess Ljubica's Residence. With his own efforts, in 1874 he created the first Botanical Garden, a laboratory under the open sky, in Dorćol, near the banks of the Danube. It was attached to the Great School, from where it was financed. Pančić was the first manager and worked with his associates for years on its arrangement and maintenance. The garden, however, was exposed to periodic floods, and in 1888 and 1889, large floods irretrievably destroyed the planted plants. In 1889, one year after the death of Josif Pančić, King Milan Obrenović allocated his grandfather Jevrem's estate in the very center of Belgrade for a botanical garden. The new botanical garden, named in honor of Jevrem Obrenović, "Jevremovac," is located in the same location today and represents a green oasis in the heart of the city. In 1860, Josif Pančić also left his large herbarium collection of "6.000 fels" to Serbian science, as he says in a letter to the competent ministry. Pančić's herbarium (Herbarium Pancicianum) became a state collection, the property of the Botanical Cabinet of the then Lyceum. Today, it is part of the Herbarium of the Institute of Botany and Botanical Garden "Jevremovac" of the Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade, registered under the international code BEOU in the list of official world herbariums. Today, Pančić's herbarium consists of 162 boxes and contains 743 genera of plants represented in our flora and 15.416 individual herbarium sheets. The collection contains 5.332 different plant taxa of species level and lower systematic categories. The greatest value of Pančić's herbarium is undoubtedly represented by the plants that he himself or with his closest collaborators Roberto de Viziani or Savo Petrović described as new taxa for science (type specimens).

There are herbarium specimens for 91 taxa that Pančić described as new to science. Almost half of those plants were described by the scientific community as "good species". Pančić's herbarium also represents evidence of changes in the vascular flora in the last 170 years and points to the former distribution of today's endangered, rare and vulnerable species in Serbia. Doctor Josif Pančić was a member of a large number of societies, for example: Society of Serbian Literature, first president and regular member of the Serbian Royal Academy, Serbian Learned Society, member of the State Council, deputy and vice president of the National Assembly, Serbian Medical Society, Serbian Archaeological Society. He was a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Brandenburg Botanical Society, the Geological Institute of Vienna, the Naturalist Society of Cherbourg and the Zoological and Botanical Society of Vienna. In the First Serbian-Turkish War, Pančić was appointed head of the Military Hospital in Belgrade, from July 20 to September 22, 1876. For his military merits in that war, Dr. Josif Pančić was awarded the Order of the Takovo Cross. During the Second Serbian-Turkish War, Dr. Josif Pančić was also the head of the Military Hospital in Belgrade from December 1, 1877 to January 22, 1878. During the Serbo-Bulgarian War, from November 2 to 15, 1885, Dr. Josif Pančić voluntarily served as the warden of the Military Hospital. In addition to the Order of the Takovski Cross, Pančić is a holder of the Order of Saint Sava of the First Order and the Cross of the Red Cross Society. Pančić died on March 8 (February 25) 1888, in the middle of his work. He completed the foreword for the book Botanical Garden a few days before his death. The first player of the Balkan Peninsula worked even during his sick leave. He was buried in Belgrade, and in order to fulfill his last wish to find his eternal rest on the mountain he especially loved and which he devotedly researched, his remains were transferred to the mausoleum on the top of Kopaonik on July 5, 1951. The highest peak of Kopaonik (2017 m), was named after the Serbian botanist, Pančić's Peak. On one side of the mausoleum there is a plaque with the inscription: "Fulfilling Pančić's vow, we transfer him to eternal rest here. We also publish his message addressed to the Serbian youth: "That only through deep knowledge and study of the nature of our country will they show how much they love and respect their homeland" (3 -7).