The Most Famous
WRESTLERS from Croatia
This page contains a list of the greatest Croatian Wrestlers. The pantheon dataset contains 700 Wrestlers, 1 of which were born in Croatia. This makes Croatia the birth place of the 53rd most number of Wrestlers behind Bosnia and Herzegovina and Greece.
Top 1
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Croatian Wrestlers of all time. This list of famous Croatian Wrestlers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Nikolai Volkoff (1947 - 2018)
With an HPI of 43.80, Nikolai Volkoff is the most famous Croatian Wrestler. His biography has been translated into 21 different languages on wikipedia.
Josip Hrvoje Peruzović (October 14, 1947 – July 29, 2018), better known by his ring name Nikolai Volkoff, was a Croatian-American professional wrestler from Yugoslavia, best known for his time in the World Wrestling Federation where he usually played a Soviet heel. In the 1970s, Peruzović was Bepo of the Mongols tag team, one of the masked Executioners and feuded with Bruno Sammartino over the WWWF World Heavyweight Championship as Volkoff. In the 1980s, he tag teamed with the Iron Sheik and won the WWF Tag Team Championship at the inaugural WrestleMania event, and then with Boris Zhukov as The Bolsheviks. In 1990, Volkoff turned face and defected to America, briefly feuding with Zhukov and newly-heel Iraqi sympathizer Sgt. Slaughter. In 1994, after a hiatus, he returned as a destitute and desperate character, exploited by Ted DiBiase as the first member of his Million Dollar Corporation. He continued to wrestle in various promotions until his death in 2018.
Pantheon has 1 people classified as wrestlers born between 1947 and 1947. Of these 1, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased wrestlers include Nikolai Volkoff.
