Felser Ivan

Ivan Felser was born in Maribor as the first of four sons in the Felser family. His father worked at the post office, but was transferred to Zidani most in 1914, where he worked as a postal clerk at the railway station until 1947. The family moved a few times, when finally settling in 1928 in their own house in nearby Radeče. Ivan completed his primary schooling in Radeče in 1922, and then became an apprentice in Ivan Rebek’s locksmith workshop in Celje. He completed his apprenticeship with best results in July 1925, and then decided to enrol at the naval school, which owing to the fact that it offered free education enabled him to help his family out of financial crisis.

In 1925 and 1926 he attended the Mechanical N.C.O. School in Kumbor. He was a student of the XI class. He finished his training as a sergeant in the mechanical department. In 1936, he passed the officer course for mechanical engineering officers in Djenović and promoted to mechanical second lieutenant, and in 1940 to lieutenant.

He served on different ships of the Royal Yugoslav Navy: as a turbine operator on board torpedo boat T7 and as an engine driver on the Spasilac and the Vila. When he sailed on the Vila in 1934, King Aleksander I Karadjordjević with his family was also on board. In October 1934, the king was preparing to set off on a voyage with the ship Dubrovnik to Marseille. At that time, the Vila with Ivan Felser on board accompanied him to the Bay of Kotor. There, the king boarded the Dubrovnik, which eventually brought him to Marseilles, and after the king’s assassination on 9 October 1934, the coffin with his remains was brought home. In 1941, he was in Šibenik serving on the torpedo boat T5 as a lieutenant in the engineering department, an active officer of the engine drive, and as an engineer officer for the III torpedo division. Upon the capitulation of Yugoslavia on 17 April 1941, he returned to Radeče by train in June 1941. He was first compelled to work against his will in an aircraft factory in Maribor, then in Braunschweig. In 1943, he was overqualified and assigned to Neudorf near Vienna. There he stayed to see the end of World War II.

After liberation, he returned home to Radeče, where he got a job in 1946. Most of the time, however, he worked in Zagreb at the Steam Boiler Factory. He was in charge of the steam boiler assembly, for which he had been trained in the Navy, although his work was mostly carried on locations all over Yugoslavia. He never returned to the Navy.

He married in 1951. In 2009, his daughters Marija Pust and Ana Artnak donated part of his maritime legacy to the Maritime Museum: notebooks from his maritime training and a few documents. In an article about their father (published in the museum's booklet Izvestja 2, 2010), the daughters wrote that they made skirts and dresses from the uniforms their father had brought home. They saved, however, their father's photographs and rendered the Maritime Museum Piran to make copies of them.

Prepared by Nadja Terčon

Source:

Museum photo documentation

Pust, Marija, Artnak, Ana: Ivan Felser: 6. 12. 1907 – 5. 12. 1987. In Izvestja Pomorskega muzeja Piran, 2, 2010, Piran, 2010, pp. 154 - 160.