The Greatest Croatian was an open-access poll conducted over five weeks in 2003 by the Croatian weekly Nacional. The public was invited to vote via the magazine's website, text messages and postcards to determine the "Greatest Croatian" in history. Almost 8,000 votes were received during the course of the poll (6,507 via Internet, 520 text messages and 752 postcards), and the final results were published in the magazine's 6 January 2004 issue.

Final list

Due to the nature of the poll used to select and rank, the results do not pretend to be an objective assessment. The poll also had no rules on ethnicity or nationality of candidates, with readers free to send in votes for whomever they felt contributed to the history and society of modern-day Croatia. In addition, Nacional published the list of people ordered by votes received, although two of these were listed twice in duplicate entries, which was likely due to tabulation error: Without the two duplicates, the list would have had 96 entries, but since two of these involve pairs of notable people (17th-century noblemen Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan at no. 37, and 19th-century explorer brothers Mirko and Stjepan Seljan at no. 88) the list ends up having 98 individuals. They are as follows: