“The place where a person is born remains a dear memory throughout their life, even after they leave it,” said Vladimir Prelog.
Vladimir Prelog, Nobel laureate, Sarajevan, and honorary citizen of Sarajevo, was born on 23 July 1906, in the old part of the city, at Josip Štadler Street, number 69. A commemorative plaque was placed on his birthplace in 2006 by the Croatian Cultural Society “Napredak”, of which he had been a scholarship recipient. The “Napredak Scholarship Fund” for students is also named in his honour.
The Nobel laureate attended elementary school in Sarajevo. After his parents divorced in 1915, he moved with his father to Croatia. He completed elementary school in Zagreb, where he also began high school, and later moved to Osijek with his father in his third year. There, under the influence of Professor Ivan Kurija, he developed an interest in chemistry.
At just 15 years old, Prelog published his first scientific paper in chemistry, which appeared in Chemiker Zeitung. After graduating from high school in 1924, he went on to study chemistry in Prague, where he earned his degree in 1928 and doctorate in 1929 under Emil Votoček. During this time, he also collaborated with chemist Rudolf Lukeš.
After completing his doctorate, Prelog worked briefly in the laboratory of the chemical wholesaler G. J. Dřize, and in 1934 returned to Zagreb, where he became director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the Technical Faculty. In 1941, due to the political circumstances of the time, he moved to Switzerland, where he began teaching at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.
Although he completed his schooling in Croatia and spent most of his life in Zurich, after his death on 7 January 1998, Zagreb received the urn containing his ashes. In his birthplace, Sarajevo, a side street in the Buča Potok neighbourhood now bears his name.
Prelog never forgot Sarajevo, often mentioning it in interviews.
“The place where a person is born remains a dear memory throughout their life, even after they leave it. I spent my early childhood in Sarajevo, where I attended elementary school. I was also present during the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As schoolchildren, we were given baskets of flowers and told to stand in line and throw them before the carriage carrying the Archduke and his wife Sophie. After I did what I was told, just about a hundred meters away, gunshots rang out – and what many say was the start of the First World War happened. I didn’t see anything, but I heard it,” said Vladimir Prelog in an interview with journalist Vehid Gunić, recorded in his book Prelog.
In 1975, Vladimir Prelog received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the stereochemistry of organic molecules and their reactions. He was also a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Prelog was elected a member of the Royal Society in London, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1961), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Irish Academy, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Paris, Liverpool, Brussels, Cambridge, and Manchester.
