Simon Rutar  Simon Rutar (12 October 1851 – 3 May 1903) was a Slovene historian and geographer. He wrote primarily on the history and geography of the areas that are now part of the Slovenian Littoral, the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Croatian counties of Istria and Primorsko-Goranska. Rutar was born in a peasant family in the Alpine village of Krn near Kobarid, in what was then the Austrian county of Gorizia and Gradisca (now in Slovenia). He attended the State Secondary School in Gorizia. In 1873 he enrolled at the University of Graz, where he studied history, geography, and philology. In Graz, he was shaped by the contemporary positivist approaches in human sciences. In 1878 he was mobilized in the Austro-Hungarian Army, in a unit sent to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was demobilized in Autumn 1879 and returned to Graz. The following year he got a job as a high school history teacher in the Dalmatian town of Kotor. In 1882, he moved to Split, where he taught at the local lyceum for the next eight years. There, he met Frane Bulić, a Croatian historian and archeologist who introduced him to the latest trends in archeology. During his years in Split, Rutar started publishing numerous articles on the local history of his native lands, especially the County of Gorizia. He established close contacts with the Carniolan Rudolfinium Museum, led by the renowned historian and archeologist Karel Dežman, where he helped as an expert in archeological excavations in the Slovene Lands. In 1889 he settled in Ljubljana, where he was employed as a teacher at the Second State Gymnasium of Ljubljana. He died in the night between May 3 and May 4, when he was caught in a fire that burned down his house. Most of his personal archive was also destroyed in the fire. He was buried in St. Christopher's Cemetery in Ljubljana. In 1936, his tomb was transferred to the monumental Navje cemetery, in which prominent Slovenes are buried. Rutar was one of the first Slovene historians that employed the new rigorous methods of positivist historical science into his writings. He wrote mostly on the history of political and legal institutions in the Austrian Littoral and Friuli from the feudal age to the late 18th century.