Still, as soon as they arrived, they were met by fra Marijan Šunjić from Orašje who told them that this idea was hopeless at the time, and sent them off to the Fojnica monastery with a letter recommending that the Franciscan provincial find them a refuge outside Bosnia.

However, in 1851, he published his proclamation Requests and pleas of the Christians in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and fell out of favour with Omar Pasha so much that he was banished to Istanbul and ordered never to return to his home country.

We Bosnians, the once-famous people, now that we are barely alive, our friends of science see us as heads detached from the Slavic tree and pity us.

...It is time to awake from long-lasting negligence; give us the cup, and from the well of apprehension, inexhaustibly gain knowledge and wisdom; firstly, let us try to cleanse our hearts from prejudice, reach for books and magazines; let's see what the others did so that we can use the same means, that our nation of simple people from the darkness of ignorance to the light of truth we bring.Having lived during one of the most dramatic periods in Bosnia's history, which was marked by the insurgency of the Bosnian Muslim nobility (led by Husein Gradaščević) against the attempts of its Ottoman administrators to carry out modernizing reforms throughout their ailing empire, Jukić was fascinated by the idea of liberal civic order, equality and national freedom for South Slavs.

Together with Marijan Šunjić, Martin Nedić, Jako Baltić, Blaž Josić and fra Grgo Martić, Jukić's cultural and political orientation was based on the para-political tradition of Bosna Srebrena as a Franciscan province and the only officially recognized entity under the influence of the Catholic Church in the Ottoman Balkans at the time.

Founder and editor of the first literary magazine in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosanski prijatelj (Bosnian Friend), Jukić was an advocate of the religion-independent cultural identity which put into practice the idea of universal civic education not tied to religious affiliation.

For him, as Ivan Lovrenović observed in his seminal work Bosanski Hrvati, ethnic and denominational borders of the Bosnian microcosm were neither absolute nor God-given.

[9] Jukić's famous 1850 memorandum to the Ottoman government, titled Želje i molbe kristjanah u Bosni i Hercegovini, koje ponizno prikazuju njegovom veličanstvu sretnovladajućem sultanu Abdul-Medžidu, represents the first draft of a European-inspired civic constitution in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In it, Jukić demands that the Catholic and Orthodox populations of Bosnia are no longer called raja but citizens of the Ottoman Empire, just like the ruling Muslim stratum of the Bosnian society at the time.