He was born in
Medulin, into a peasant family. Kirac finished elementary school in his native Medulin. He went to high school in Senj and Rijeka, financially supported by
Juraj Dobrila, who had first noticed his brightness. At the beginning of the First World War, the Austrian authorities checked his activities. He was first interned, and then put under heightened surveillance. His second internment followed Italy's entry into the war. Thereafter, he didn't even return to Medulin, and shared instead the same fate of the Istrian women, children and elderly, who were moved into the inner part of the Monarchy. The Istrians moved to different places within Austria, At a young age, he became aware of how facts about Istria were biasedly presented by the local elite, so he embarked on the study of historical material, especially archival material stored in parishes. He studied old documents and read the notes of his predecessor, the Croatian revivalist, municipal leader
Josip Batel. Although he was not an educated historian, he proved to be an excellent scholar of history. Topics he wrote about were the immigration of Slavs into the Istrian peninsula, the penetration of the Croatian people into towns and castles, the survival of the culture of the Croatian people, the geographical spread in the villages and more. These were topics that had hitherto been neglected and misrepresented. Unlike the previous practice of historians, Kirac was ahead of his time. Instead of describing the feudal lords, he described the people, broad He saw that the results of his research would shatter Italian theses and that irredentists would not shy away from destroying historical evidence that did not go in their favor. He already had an unpleasant experience with a fire that destroyed old Croatian documents in the municipality and at the same time destroyed evidence of embezzlement by the Italian municipal administration. Because of that, he secretly smuggled the documents from the parish of his native Medulin to Zagreb, where they were stored in the JAZU Archives. Part of these documents was written in Glagolitic. Due to all this, his most significant work,
Sketches from Istrian History, which is a depiction of the medieval history of Croats on the Istrian peninsula, was not published during his lifetime, but remained in manuscript until after the liberation of Istria in 1946. In his paper, Kirac wrote about the immigration of Croats, the development of feudal society and the culture of the Croatian people. Kirac was a danger to the Italian authorities even after he died. For his funeral, people flocked to Medulin from everywhere for the last farewell to the beloved local. The fascist authorities perceived his funeral as a provocation. His funeral in his native Medulin, "was a political and social event that proved that the national struggle in Istria was a struggle for human and ethical rights of Croats and that they cannot be silenced and extinguished by any terror." Today, there is a memorial plaque in Medulin in his memory. ==References==