Spiridon Gopčević

Spiridon Gopčević (; 9 July 1855 – 1928), also known under the pseudonym Leo Brenner, was a Serbian-Austrian amateur astronomer, journalist, writer and historian born in Trieste. His works on the modern history of Serbia and the Balkans were written from a nationalist point-of-view.

Life Gopčević was born on 9 July 1855 in Trieste. He originated from the village of Podi near Herceg Novi, in Boka Kotorska (modern-day Montenegro), then a part of the Austrian Empire. Gopčević received his education in Vienna, after which he began his journalistic and writing career. At this observatory, Gopčević used the 17.5 cm refractor telescope to make observations of planets.

He initially published works in Journal of the British Astronomical Association and The English Mechanic and World of Science. However, when he began to produce results that seemed unrealistic to his contemporaries, such as claiming in the 1890s that the rotation time of Venus is 23 hours, 57 minutes and 36.2396 seconds, Mercury - 33.25 hours, Uranus - 8 hours and 17 minutes, his works were no longer accepted. "Brenner published drawings of Jupiter that were well accepted", and "After being banned from many journals, Brenner published his own, which included invented endorsements from respected astronomers. Such trickery suggests his erroneous discoveries were not simply innocent errors but deceptions." Per Austrian historian Martin Stangl, he had "a nearly pathological craving for fame and recognition" in combination with an "overestimation of the possible." A new observatory was built on Mali Lošinj in 1993, and was named "Leo Brenner".

Views

Politically, Gopčević promoted the national interests and policy of Kingdom of Serbia. Gopčević's study was the first significant one from a Serbian scholar with a claim about Macedonian Slavs.

Gopčević's biographer argues that he did not actually go to Kosovo and the study is not based on authentic experiences. In the book, Gopčević wrote that the Albanians of upper Reka are "albanicised Slavs". He claimed that most of the South Slavs were actually Serbs and that their languages were dialects of the Serbian language. Another claim made was that the population of Kosovo was originally almost entirely of Serbian origin and was partially Islamized. Gopčević split the non-Serb population of Kosovo into two groups: Albanians of Serbian origin and Islamized Serbs. Thus, Gopčević denied the existence of a long-established Albanian ethnicity in Kosovo, emphasizing its population as purely Serbian. Per him, the majority of Kosovo's population consisted of Serbian Christians. Gopčević did not include sources for his demographic data and it was an arbitrary assessment because Ottoman censuses were based on religion and not ethnicity.

In his 1951 book Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia, British academic Henry Robert Wilkinson wrote about Gopčević's book: "It is a firm axiom of the propagandist, however, that an initial failure may be turned into an ultimate success by the simple process of reiteration. Gopčević at least provided the Serbs with their initial failure." According to academics Thomas A. Dobbins and William Sheehan, he championed conflicting causes, such as Serbian nationalism, Albanian independence, and a defense of the Hapsburg monarchy.

Works Montenegro und die Montenegriner, 1877 Oberalbanien und seine Liga, 1881 Bulgarien und Ostrumelien, 1886 Kriegsgeschichtliche Studien, 2 Bände, 1887

(als Leo Brenner): Beobachtungs-Objekte für Amateur-Astronomen, 1902 USA. Aus dem Dollarlande; Sitten, Zustände und Einrichtungen der Vereinigten Staaten, 1913 Das Fürstentum Albanien, seine Vergangenheit, ethnographischen Verhältnisse, politische Lage und Aussichten für die Zukunft, 1914 Geschichte von Montenegro und Albanien, 1914 Aus dem Lande der unbegrenzten Heuchelei. Englische Zustände, 1915 Rußland und Serbien von 1804-1915. Nach Urkunden der Geheimarchive von St. Petersburg und Paris und des Wiener Archivs, 1916 Amerikas Rolle im Weltkriege, 1917 Die Wahrheit über Jesus nach den ausgegrabenen Aufzeichnungen seines Jugendfreundes, 1920 Kulturgeschichtliche Studien, 1920 Österreichs Untergang : die Folge von Franz Josefs Mißregierung, 1920 Serbokroatisches Gesprächsbuch verbunden mit kurzer Sprachlehre und Wörterverzeichnis, 1920