Lajos Ossoinack, Knight

From a young age, Johannes Aloysius Ossoinack (Rieka, 26 June 1849 - Rijeka, 28 October 1904), from a merchant family in Rijeka, founded several industrial and shipping companies in Rijeka, which later became world famous, while he was also a prominent figure in local political and social life. He was to the town what Széchenyi was to Hungary: he spent his life seeking new innovations (mechanised woodworking, modern rice processing, oil refining, etc.) and made a name for himself by introducing methods that had proved successful abroad.

His life

Rijeka's history has always been characterised by trade and local industry based on shipping... By the 1870s, steamships had taken over from sailing ships in maritime transport. For Rijeka, the consequences of modernisation were swift and seemingly fatal, as families who made their living from building wooden ships went bankrupt, and the spill-over effects made the shopkeepers and restaurateurs who made their living from their consumption increasingly unprofitable, leading to the impoverishment of the town's population in the long term.

Historically, this period coincided with the reannexation of the town (Rieka-Fiume), occupied by the Croats in 1848, to Hungary (1868) and the beginning of the construction of the port (1870). The construction of the railway (1873), the modernisation of the port, the establishment of offices in Fiume and the laws granting tax relief for the establishment of factories created a favourable framework that attracted capitalists. Although a number of businesses were established in Rijeka in the 1870s, there was one man who, looking back in later decades, was able to catalyse the establishment of local industry and commerce and thus the destiny of the town, in every way, with his own stimulating ideas. That was Lajos Ossoinack.

Childhood

The Ossoinack family originated from a village called Osojnaki, halfway between Rijeka and Volosko. The first known member of the family was Andrea Ossoinack, a wine and olive oil merchant from Volosko, who lived in the late 1700s. Andrea's son Giuseppe continued his father's business, but when the British besieged the Napoleonic-protected Rijeka in 1811, he lost almost all his ships and was ruined; he then moved to Rijeka with his 12 children after his wife's death in 1820. His youngest son, Natalin Gennaro Ossoinack, converted his father's wine business and opened a local tavern on the right bank of the Fiumara River, which he was able to enrich with a distillery through his marriage to Maria Repach.

His youth

From this marriage was born Joannes Aloysius Ossoinack, who was baptised on 26 June 1849 in Rieksa, then under Croatian occupation. The young Lajos studied at the commercial academies in Ljubljana and Graz, and then pursued higher commercial maritime studies in Trieste, Hamburg, Odessa, London and New York. Thanks to his travels, in addition to his Italian, Hungarian and Croatian mother tongues, he learned excellent German, English, French and Russian and became well acquainted with the workings of world trade at the time.

Her marriage

In 1874 (at the age of 25), Ossoinack returned to Rijeka, which had become Hungarian again, with the Western models and an extensive network of contacts. Within a year (16 January 1875) he married Anna Baccich, a woman of Gravovese origin, and later had several children: Gennaro Ossoinack (1876), Andrea Ossoinack (1878), Nicola Ossoinack (1881), Luigia Ossoinack (1882), Tassilo Ossoinack (1884), Renzo Ossoinack (1891).

Death of

It is sad that Ossoinack's life came to an unexpected end, as he committed suicide on 28 October 1904 under circumstances that are still unclear. According to the press of the time, 12 years to the day before, Ossoinack had shot a thief who was tilling his garden with a pistol, and the thief died instantly. It is believed that Ossoinack, under the burden of guilt, could no longer live his life like that. After his death, his place in the companies he founded was taken by his son Andrea Ossoinack (Endre in Hungarian), who used the economic capital he had acquired here to forge political capital for himself, first as a member of the Rijeka Parliament (1915-1918) and then as one of the founders and main economic supporters of the Rijeka Free State from 1920-24.

Professional activity

Ossoinack Mechanical Woodworking Ltd.

At just 25, Ossoinack quickly realised the crisis the city was facing as a result of the bankruptcy of the wooden shipbuilding industry. In 1875, together with his brother-in-law Eugenio (Jenő) Baccich, he founded the Ossoinack Mechanical Woodworking Company (Lavoratorio Meccanico Legnami Luigi Ossoinack Societá Anonima), which used the high-quality raw material flowing into the port to produce crates and barrels, thus putting local woodworkers back to work. Records show that between 1890 and 1909 the factory employed only men, an average of 55, but when, in 1912, under Endre O., the factory was expanded to include a brush and paintbrush production section, the same number of women were employed. The workers were assisted by several machines with a total capacity of 25-30 horsepower. The average annual production of crates and barrels was 197,087 units, of which 46.5% were barrels and 53.5% were crates. The total value of production averaged 292,048 Crowns per year.

Adria Hungarian Royal Shipping Company Rt.

As well as keeping the local timber industry alive, the Ark and Barrel factory encouraged Ossoinack to take another important step. As early as 1874, the enterprising young man had taken the initiative with Count Géza Szápáry, Governor of Fiume, to ask the state to support the establishment of a direct sea link between Fiume and Liverpool as an experiment. Ossoinack saw clearly that, under the pressure of the German customs policy in Bismarck, Hungarian flour and agricultural products could only be delivered to Western markets by sea. As a result, the Adria Hungarian Royal Shipping Company was gradually established, which transported flour in Ossoinack's barrels throughout its existence, first to Western Europe and later to Brazil.

Development of the port of Rijeka

At the end of the 1870s, Lajos Ossoinack, together with the engineer Giovanni de Ciotta (mayor of Rijeka from 1872 to 1896) and the local industrialists Ettore Catinelli and Antonio Francesco Smouquina, drew up a plan that was incorporated into the programme for the construction of the port of Rijeka, signed by the Hungarian engineer Antal Hajnal and the Marseille port designer Hilarion Pascal. Work continued in stages until 1914, when new plans for modernisation were still being drawn up. By 1906, however, the modern port of Rijeka had been completed and by 1910 it had become the tenth busiest maritime hub in Europe in terms of freight traffic. The construction of the harbour created some 6 kilometres of quays, two kilometres of breakwaters, 50 hectares of land filled in and 60 hectares of water basin between the breakwaters and the piers.

A Fiumei Első Rizshántoló- és Keményítőgyár Rt.

The construction of the railway and the development of the port of Rijeka successfully attracted large domestic banks to the city, which often set up industrial companies after their establishment in order to take advantage of the tax breaks provided by the law. The Rice Husking Factory in Fiume was founded by Lajos Ossoinack with the financing of the Hungarian General Credit Bank on 11 July 1881. The factory was established with its seat in Budapest and a capital of 800,000 HUF, with Nándor Zichy as its president and Ede Pallavicini, Major Count (Hungarian General Credit Bank) and Arthur Steinacker as vice-presidents. The factory itself, with two buildings (a rice mill and a starch factory), was built in Ponsal, on the outskirts of Rijeka, and operated until the outbreak of the war with an average annual dividend of 10-15%.

Petroleum Refinery Ltd.

The history of the founding of the Rijeka Petroleum Refinery has been an adventurous one. The industry came into being after the experiments of Ignác Łukasiewicz (1854), who was the first to produce lamp oil from petroleum. Subsequently, the search for black gold began in many parts of the world. In the years 1875-1885, the then obsolete sailing ships transported large quantities of oil from the United States to Europe, as the Rockefeller price war in America drove down the price of oil and the cheap commodity flooded the European market. At the same time, the Rothschild and Nobel families started to extract oil in the Batum and Baku regions of Russia, but they needed somewhere in Europe to build their oil refineries. Lajos Ossoinack finally persuaded the Rothschild-owned Hungarian General Credit Bank that, since Rijeka was located at the midpoint of the imaginary Gibraltar-Batum axis, a factory there would be the best place to take the American and Russian oil and distribute the refined products on the European market. The plant was built to the north-west of the major port with a separate, lockable oil terminal for which the Hungarian State Railways built the rails, filling stations and loading bay connecting to the Fiume station at its own expense, at a cost of Frt 1,320,000.

Kőolajfinomítógyár Rt., the refinery operator, was established on 13 October 1882 with its seat in Budapest. The company was founded in 1882 in 1882. Milutin Barač was appointed technical director of the Fiume site. The company's share capital was HUF 1,500,000, which had increased to K 8,800,000 by 1912.

The plant was able to operate successfully with a steady and dwindling production volume due to the effects of the world market, and while in the early years it paid dividends of 80-90%, in the years before the war it remained stable at around 40%.

Oriente Hungarian Shipping Ltd.

In 1891-93, in order to secure supplies for his rice mill, Ossoinack, together with local capitalists, founded Oriente Hungarian Shipping Company, which, as its name suggests, specialised in the Rijeka-Far East trade. According to archival records, Oriente Rt. transported a total of 1,369,382 tons of goods between 1893 and 1914. Of the company's total cargo, 28% was destined for Rijeka, 11.4% for Cardiff and 9.5% for Singapore. The total volume of goods shipped by the company to Rijeka was 308,986 tonnes, of which 64% was paddy rice, and the same product accounted for 17.5% of the company's total turnover, thus the company has established itself in the world market not only as a servicer of the Rijeka factory but also as a free shipping company.

Rijeka Public Warehouse Ltd.

In 1891, when the free port status of Fiume was abolished, Ossoinack realised that the city, due to the increasing traffic, needed port warehouses, which he made possible by founding the Fiume Public Warehouse Ltd. with the help of the Hungarian Trade Company. This company, using the warehouses located on the piers of the port that had been built in the meantime, provided logistical facilities for the goods waiting in the port.

Emigration between Rijeka and New York

Emigration from Hungary to North America began to explode at the turn of the century. The Hungarian government, in order to keep track of the emigrants, tried to divert passenger traffic to Rijeka and negotiated with several foreign shipping companies to transport emigrants. Finally, at the intervention of Lajos Ossoinack (1902), the state entrusted the task to Adria Rt, or more precisely, through the Hungarian company, its Liverpool agent, the Cunard Steamship Company, which by then had acquired a great deal of experience in passenger transport. From then until the outbreak of the war, Cunard ships operated monthly services between Rijeka and New York, and on one of these services in 1912 the steamer RMS Carpathia rescued the survivors of the RMS Titanic.

Public activities

Little is said in the sources about Ossoinack's role in local politics. What is certain is that he was a member of the town council that governed Rijeka and was the main economic patron of the Rijeka Autonomous Party, which was born as a result of the political strife that began in 1896.

His literary work

His most important works

Lajos Ossoinack has left us with one definitive piece of writing. The Borovszky - Sziklay team's large-volume Hungary's Counties and Towns series, Rijeka and the Hungarian Seas, includes a chapter on the state of the "Hungarian Navy" in 1896, with the contribution of Lajo Ossoinack.

In memory of

We regret to say that the memory of Lajos Ossoinack has not survived to the present day, as Fiume became a hotspot of historical storms in the 20th century and the constant changes of borders and empires made the locals forget the prosperity of the former Hungarian period. Since 1918, the city (Rijeka) is now a city of the 6th state, and the locals have almost nothing in common with the Rijeka of a hundred years ago.

The Fluminensis Association is trying to keep Ossoinack's memory alive in Hungary: this means, on the one hand, that we would like to erect a memorial plaque or statue to this renowned expert in Rijeka; and, on the other hand, we have managed to bring him to the attention of researchers in several scientific works.

Sources

• Pelles Márton - Zsigmond Gábor (2018): The Hungarian maritime trade history of Fiume (1868-1918). Pécs, Pro Pannonia.
• Samani, Salvatore (1975): Dizionario biografico fiumano. Dolo - Venezia. Istituto Tipografico Editorale.
• Sučević-Međeral, Krešimir (2017): Businessman - The Case of Ossoinack Family and Fiume. Collegium Antropologicum. 41/4.
• József Szinnyei (1903). The Life and Times of the Life and Times of the People of Budapest. Books by Viktor Hornyánszky.