section_path: Background
section_name: Background
paragraph_text: Background
  
  His father, Stipe Milanović (1937–2019), was an economist, and his mother, Đurđica "Gina" (née Matasić), a former teacher of English and German. His paternal family hails from the Sinj environs. He stated that his father's family roots going back a century or two are from Livno, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His paternal grandfather and paternal great-uncle, Ante and Ivan Milanović, respectively, from Glavice, joined the Yugoslav Partisans in 1942, taking part later in the liberation of Trieste. His maternal family Matasić is an old Senj bourgeois family, with some distant roots in Lika, Gacka valley. His maternal grandmother and grandfather were Marija (née Glavaš) and Stjepan Matasić, respectively. Their daughter Đurđica, Milanović's mother, was born and raised in Senj with three other siblings. Stjepan Matasić was killed in 1943 when the Allies bombed German-occupied Senj. Marija then moved with her children to Sušak, where she met Petar Plišić, a blacksmith from Ličko Lešće, whom she married and moved together with him to Zagreb, where they raised Đurđica and the rest of her siblings. Plišić, was—as Milanović revealed in 2016—an Ustasha, a member of the paramilitary corps established by the Nazi - collaborationist government of the Independent State of Croatia. After World War II, he served two years in Stara Gradiška prison before being released.
  
  Zoran's father was a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ). Milanović was baptized secretly by his maternal grandmother Marija at the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Zagreb, and given the baptismal name Marijan. He was brought up in the neighbourhoods of Knežija, and after 1970 in Trnje. He had a brother, Krešimir, who died in 2019. Milanović attended the Center for Management and Judiciary from 1981. Milanović partook in sports, including football, basketball and boxing. He declared himself as a leftist. In 1985, he entered the University of Zagreb to study law, then finished his military service, and returned to study in 1986. There is evidence that Milanović too joined the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1985.
  
  After college, Milanović became an intern at the Zagreb Commercial Court, and in 1993 for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, working under future political rival Ivo Sanader. A year later, he joined an OSCE peacekeeping mission in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, disputed between Armenian natives and Azerbaijan. In 1994, he married his wife Sanja Musić, with whom he has two sons: Ante Jakov, and Marko. Apart from Croatian, he speaks English, French, and Russian.
  
  Milanović is a fan of the Croatian football club Hajduk Split.