High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Simon Rutar (12 October 1851 - 3 May 1903), was a Slovene historian and geographer. He wrote primarily on the history and geography of the areas that are now part of the Slovenian Littoral, the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Croatian counties of Istria and Primorsko-Goranska.Rutar was born in a peasant family in the Alpine village of Krn near Kobarid, in what was then the Austrian county of Gorizia and Gradisca (now in Slovenia).