SUPILO, FRANO (187o-1917), Yugoslav statesman, was born of poor Croat parents at Cavtat (Ragusa Vecchia) in southern Dalmatia. In 190o he became editor of Novi List, a Croat paper published at Fiume, which became a rallying ground for opposition to the intolerable regime, of Count Khuen Heder vary. In 1905, together with Trumbi6, Cingrija and Smodlaka, he drew up the resolution of Fiume, which became the basis of political co-operation between Serbs and Croats in the critical period before the World War. When the Magyar coalition parties came into power in Hungary in April 1906 and placed the Serbo Croat coalition in office at Zagreb, Supilo became a deputy at Budapest.
Within a year Magyarising tendencies produced an acute con flict between Budapest and Zagreb, and for a time Supilo was the soul of Croat resistance. He thus became a marked man and was specially aimed at in the notorious forgeries by which the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office attempted to prove Serbia's revolutionary intrigues in Croatia and thereby to justify the annexation of Bosnia in 1908. At the Friedjung trial, however,
in Dec. 1909 Supilo was triumphantly vindicated. He was the first to discover the secret negotiations with Italy which culminated in the Treaty of London (April 26, 1915) and ear nestly warned Sazonov of the disastrous complications to which it would give rise ; but he was unable to prevent the promise of wide Slav territories on the Eastern Adriatic to Italy in the event of victory. Supilo came into conflict with the Pan-Serb and re actionary tendencies of Pagi6, and even withdrew from the Yugo slav Committee, which in the early stages of the War he regarded as unduly subservient to Belgrade. But before his premature death (in London, Sept. 23, 1917) he heartily endorsed the Declaration of Corfu, issued in July 1917, which laid down the lines upon which the Yugoslav State was to be constructed.