In a world where the lines between reality and legend are often blurred, the story of Frano Selak remains one of the most unbelievable and astonishing.
This Croatian music teacher did not become known for his talent, inventions, or political achievements – but for a series of accidents he was involved in, which would have cost most of us our lives.
His life was marked by a series of disasters, each ending in miraculous survival – and, as the crowning event, winning the lottery.
Seven times escaped death
Selak’s story begins in 1962, when he was traveling by train from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik. The train derailed and fell into an icy river. 17 people died, but Selak, hypothermic and with an injured arm, managed to swim to the shore.
A year later, he survived his only flight, which turned into a nightmare. The plane door allegedly opened during the flight, and he was sucked out by the air. By lucky coincidence, he “landed on a haystack.” The plane he had been on crashed – 19 people died.
In the following years, other accidents followed: in 1966, the bus he was in fell into a river; in 1970 and 1973, his cars caught fire, but he escaped in time; in 1995, he was hit by a city bus in Zagreb; and in 1996, when his car collided with a truck, he drove off the road into a ravine, but got stuck in a tree branch, while his car fell 90 meters into the water.
A life-changing win
After all these near-tragic events, in 2003, at the age of 73, he bought a lottery ticket and won nearly 900.000 euros. He used the money to buy a house and a boat, but a few years later, he gave away most of his wealth to friends and relatives because, as he himself said, money didn’t mean much to him.
Selak even decided to build a chapel as thanks to the Virgin Mary, because he believed she had saved him from death so many times.
True story or myth?
Although many events in his story are documented, some remain questionable – most notably the plane crash from 1963, for which no publicly available evidence exists. Still, his story has stirred imaginations and filled the pages of unusual stories for decades.
Frano Selak died in 2016 at the age of 87. He left behind a legend that is a blend of luck and misfortune, faith and statistical impossibility.
Was he really the luckiest person of all time? Maybe. But he certainly became a symbol of human persistence and the mystical intertwining of fate, N1 writes.
