Na Veliki petak

The text Na Veliki petak ("On Good Friday") draws thematically upon the tradition of Croatian regional and patriotic prose, in which the author—depicting the harsh landscapes of the Lika region, the poverty, and the arduous life of the peasantry—employs potent Christian and folk symbolism. In his pre-war realist short stories and sketches, Budak frequently utilized motifs of suffering and sacrifice to highlight the enduring resilience, moral strength, and tribulations of the people from his native region. Although Mile Budak is remembered for his political role within the Ustaša regime during the Second World War—a fact that led to his entire literary oeuvre being subjected to a long-standing ban and ideological condemnation throughout the Yugoslav era—his early literary works from the interwar period possess significant aesthetic and documentary value for the study of the development of Croatian regional prose, particularly the specific literary expression of the Lika region. Today, his body of work serves as a complex and contradictory example of the relationship between literary creation and an author’s fateful political involvement during the turbulent course of 20th-century Croatian history.