Geca Kon

Geca Kon also spelled Gaetz Kohn (; 2 August 1873 – 1941) was a Hungarian-Serbian bookstore owner and publisher. He established a bookstore in Belgrade, Serbia in 1901, and in 1905 he started his publishing business there under the name "Geca Kon a.d." In the interwar period, his company was the largest book publisher in Yugoslavia. During the 1930s, he published about 200 books a year, and earned large income. In 1929, he was elected president of the Society of Serbian publishers. Kon established several very popular editorial collections and financed young writers to boost their career.

After the start of World War II and German occupation of Serbia, Kon, who was Jewish, was arrested together with his whole family by the Nazis. They were all killed in the Holocaust. After the war and the establishment of Communist Yugoslavia, Kon's publishing company was nationalized and became a state-owned enterprise Prosveta, one of the largest publishing houses in Yugoslavia.

Early life Kon was born in Jewish family in 1873 in Csantaver, Kingdom of Hungary (now in Serbia). was a rich rabbi. Several years after Geca's birth, the family moved to Zemun (then also in the Kingdom of Hungary, now in Serbia) where Geca's father was a school principal. After finishing elementary school in Zemun, Kon enrolled in the trading school in Zemun, then in the Gymnasium in Novi Sad, but soon left education and started to work. A year later, he moved back to Belgrade, working in the Friedman bookstore, where he met his future wife Elza Wiles who also worked there. When the first Serbian Society of book publishers was established in 1921, Kon became its vice-president, and in 1929 was elected president of the Society.

Kon also had several enemies who publicly attacked him. He was attacked for being Jewish in the antisemitic journal Balkan. The journal falsely claimed that Kon was an Austro-Hungarian soldier in the World War I fighting against the Serbs. After the end of the World War II and the establishment of the Socialist Yugoslavia, the government decided to nationalize Kon's company and bookstore, as well as all of his former property. This was the basis for the establishment of the state-owned Prosveta. In 2016, the Bavarian State Library returned 203 out of 600 books that the Nazis took from Geca Kon. The rest were not found and were probably destroyed in the Allied bombing of Munich. Since there were no living relatives of Kon, the books were inherited by the National Library of Serbia.

Bookstore In the early 20th century, Geca Kon's bookstore operated from several locales in the center of Belgrade, and in 1932 settled at the address 12 Knez Mihailova Street. Prior to World War II it was the largest bookstore in the Balkans, with 700 pages of its 1938 catalogue featuring 16,000 titles. After the World War II, the bookstore became part of the Prosveta company, but the name "Geca Kon Bookstore" was kept. It kept its original interior until 1990 when it was renovated and modernized. In 1993, a memorial plaque dedicated to Geca Kon was unveiled inside the bookstore. In 2009, the building was declared a monument of culture. Prosveta was privatized in 2009, but the contract was annulled in 2010, after which the Government took over. This ignited fears that the bookstore might be closed for the first time since 1918. In June 2019, the bookstore was flooded after a storm and then closed for renovation in 2020.

In 2020, Prosveta concluded a contract with state-owned publisher Službeni Glasnik who took over the management of the bookstore. The renovated Geca Kon bookstore was opened in February 2021. It was remodeled in the spirit of the original design, with wood panels around the store windows and the entry door with the mechanism from the 1930s. The upper floor includes a memorial space with fully restored furniture and Kon's personal items.