He survived a train, a plane and a cliff, then won the lottery, if the stories are true
There is a man from Croatia who, the story goes, fell out of the sky and lived, swam out of two sinking carriages, walked away from cars that burst into flame, and was thrown from his own vehicle as it sailed off a mountain. Then, as if the universe wanted to settle the account, he won a fortune. His name is Frane Selak, and he is either the luckiest man who ever lived, or the best storyteller.
The legend of Frane Selak is really a story about luck, and about how much we want to believe in it. Illustration: Watts & Wild.
Frane Selak was a Croatian music teacher, born in 1929, who became famous late in life as the world's luckiest man. According to the tale he told, death came for him seven separate times across the decades, by train, by plane, by bus, by fire and by cliff, and seven times it missed. It is a wonderful story, and it is worth telling honestly, which means telling it with one eyebrow politely raised.
The accidents read like a disaster film stitched together from spare parts, each escape a little more outrageous than the last. Whether all of them happened exactly as described is another question, and one we will come back to.
Seven brushes with death
The legend begins on a train in the early 1960s, running from Sarajevo toward the coast, which is said to have left the rails and plunged into the freezing Neretva River. Selak supposedly broke a window, swam to the bank, and lived while others drowned. The next chapter is the one that strains belief the most: a plane journey on which, the story claims, a door blew open and Selak was sucked out at hundreds of metres, only to land in a haystack and survive.
From there the disasters keep coming. A bus is said to have skidded off a road into a river. He climbed out of that one too. By now you may be doing the same arithmetic everyone does with this story, wondering how one ordinary man could keep finding himself at the exact centre of so much catastrophe, and keep walking out of it.
The car that became a habit of catching fire
Then there were the cars. On more than one occasion, the story goes, a vehicle Selak was driving caught fire, once from a leaking fuel line that sprayed petrol across a hot engine, and each time he scrambled clear just before the flames found the tank. The most cinematic escape of all came on a mountain road, where he is said to have swerved from a truck, crashed through a barrier, and was flung out of the car to cling to a tree as the wreck exploded far below.
Taken together, it is an almost comic catalogue of near-misses, the kind of run of luck that turns a person into a local legend. By the time he reached old age, Frane Selak had a reputation in Croatia as a man death simply could not catch.
Then Frane Selak won the lottery
The story would be remarkable enough as a survival tale, but it has a final twist that turned it into a global headline. In the early 2000s, in his early seventies and just days after a birthday, Selak is said to have bought a lottery ticket and won a fortune, somewhere around 800,000 euros. After a lifetime of escaping ruin, the man finally caught a different kind of luck, the gentle kind that arrives with a cheque rather than a crash.
It was this win, and the interviews around it, that carried his name out of Croatia and across the world's newspapers. The "luckiest man alive" was suddenly everywhere, his seven disasters retold in breathless lists, and a quiet retired teacher became an international symbol of impossible good fortune.
What he did with the luck
What makes the ending oddly moving is what he said came next. By his own telling, the money did not make him happy in the way he expected. He bought a home and looked after the people he loved, but he is said to have given a great deal of it away and stepped back from the luxury, deciding he would rather live simply. He reportedly concluded that he had always been rich in the only currency that mattered, which was being alive at all.
It is a tidy moral, perhaps a little too tidy, and that is part of the charm. Frane Selak died in 2016, in his late eighties, in his bed, of nothing more dramatic than old age, which after everything else feels like the most surprising outcome of all.
The honest catch
Now for the eyebrow. As irresistible as it is, the legend of Frane Selak rests almost entirely on his own word. None of the seven disasters has ever been independently verified, some of the details shifted between different tellings, and researchers have never found a record of a plane crash in 1960s Croatia matching the haystack story. His fame, tellingly, arrived all at once in 2003, around the lottery win and a single newspaper interview that set the tale loose.
That does not make him a liar, and the lottery win and the man himself were real enough. But the honest version is that this is folklore as much as history, a story polished by retelling until it gleams. Perhaps the truest thing about Frane Selak is not that he cheated death seven times, but that we so badly want to believe one person could. In a world that often feels ruled by bad luck, the idea of a man the universe simply refused to kill is a comfort, and maybe that is reason enough for the legend to live on.
Seven disasters, one lottery win, and a quiet death in old age, all of it resting on a single man's word. Do you want the legend of Frane Selak to be true, or is it better as a story we choose to believe? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Related reading: Vesna Vulovic, who really did fall from an exploding plane and live, with the records to prove it.
