Eliza Frančiška Grizold

Eliza Grizold, Sister Marija Frančiška of the Five Wounds, (7 November 1847 – 2 April 1913) was a Slovenian teacher, poet, and composer. Member of the School Sisters of the Third Order of St Francis, she spent most of her working life teaching music and leading girls' education in the Maribor area, and is remembered for devotional poetry and church songs, including works she composed to accompany her own texts. Her mother was the farmer Marija Glaser (1816–1895), the half-sister of the priest and writer and her father was the farmer and patriot Davorin Grizold (1817–1871). Her family was devout and nationally conscious. Her mother was a Franciscan tertiary. In 1868 she entered the Congregation of the School Sisters of the Third Order of St Francis in the Eggenberg district of Graz, where she trained as a teacher. In the same year her uncle Marko Glaser, then serving in the parish of Malečnik, invited the School Sisters from Eggenberg to Malečnik; they founded a girls’ school there and organised courses in which they trained girls to become cooks, seamstresses, and maidservants. The school, where girls were taught in Slovene and German, was attended primarily by girls from farming and working-class backgrounds. The teachers there were School Sisters from Graz under her direction. Her pupils recited her poems at school celebrations. Marko Glaser, then an honorary canon in Maribor, had it printed as a booklet and distributed among the people. She wrote several other poems, which were published in Zgodnja Danica, Naš dom, Slovenski gospodar, and others. In her poems she expressed great devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Eucharist. She wrote and set to music the song Slovenka sem (I am a Slovene woman), a girls' version of the popular Slovenian song Slovenec sem (I am a Slovene man). After 1909 she moved to the School Sisters' convent in the Eggenberg district of Graz. She died of marasmus and pneumonia on 2 April 1913 in Graz.