📍Smiljan, Lika, Croatia
1856 – 1875“I was born on the 10th of July 1856 in Smiljan, a small village in the Lika region of Croatia — then part of the Austrian Empire — the son of an Orthodox priest and a mother who was herself an extraordinary inventor of household devices, though she never thought to call herself that. The Serbian Orthodox community of Smiljan shaped my early years: the liturgy, the scholarship, the tradition of learning that the church carried. I had an extraordinary memory and could perform advanced mathematics in my head from early childhood. The village and the surrounding Lika countryside — its mountains, its particular light, the Adriatic not far away — gave me a sensory imagination that I later understood was essential to the way I thought about electricity and mechanical systems. I left Smiljan at a young age and spent my life in cities, but the village stayed in my nervous system.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Carlson, W. Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (2013), Princeton University Press; Tesla, N. My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (1919, republished 2011); Cheney, M. Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981), Prentice Hall