Areas annexed to Italy in 1920 and remained Italian even after 1947
Areas annexed to Italy in 1920, passed to the Free Territory of Trieste in 1947 with the Paris treaties and definitively assigned to Italy in 1975 with the Treaty of Osimo
Areas annexed to Italy in 1920, passed to the Free Territory of Trieste in 1947 with the Paris treaties and definitively assigned to Yugoslavia in 1975 with the Osimo treaty
The Italian irredentism in Istria was the political movement supporting the unification to Italy, during the 19th and 20th centuries, of the peninsula of Istria. It is considered closely related to the Italian irredentism in Trieste and Rijeka (Fiume), two cities bordering the peninsula.
Istria was a part of the Roman Empire from 177 BC until the arrival of the Goths, who eventually occupied it. Around the beginning of the 7th century, Slavic incursions began happening around Istria and by the middle of the century, they began to settle in the region.[1]
The area came under Venetian rule around the 13th century and remained under it until the fall of the Republic of Venice to Napoleon in 1797.[2] When Napoleon conquered the territory of Istria, he found that Istria was populated by Italians on the coast and in the main cities, but the interior was populated mainly by Croats and Slovenians: this multi-ethnic population in the same peninsula created a situation of antagonism between Slovenes, Croats and Italians, when started the first nationalisms after Napoleon's fall. Since 1815 Istria was a part of the Austrian monarchy, and Croats, Slovenians and Italians engaged in a nationalistic feud with each other.[3] Following Napoleon's defeat, Istria became part of the Kingdom of Illyria and later the Austrian Littoral as the Margraviate of Istria. A census in 1910 found that 38.1% of the population of Istria was Italian, as opposed to 43.5% Serbo-Croatian and 14.3% Slovene. This census did not count ethnic groups but rather the "language of daily interaction" (Umgangssprache).
As a consequence, Istria has been a theater of a nationalistic ethnic struggle between them during the 19th and 20th centuries. Italian irredentism was actively followed by many Italians in Istria, like the Italian sailor and irredentist Nazario Sauro, native to Koper (Capodistria).[4]
Between 1918 and 1947 Istria was part of the Kingdom of Italy. Followings its annexation from Austria, the Italian government pursued Italianisation of the peninsula. Italians from elsewhere, primarily the south, were also resettled to Istria. Due to the efforts of the Italian government ruled by Benito Mussolini, the number of Slovenes and Croats in the Julian March diminished from 466 730 in 1918 to 382 113 in 1936 (a 19% drop) while the number of Italians rose from 354 908 to 559 553 (a 57% increase).
From 1923 onwards and then under the Mussolini government, assimilation of non-Italian people became a national focus. Methods included shutting down Slovene and Croatian schools and public institutions, gerrymandering to reduce the number of Slovene representatives in Rome, pushing Slovene and Croatian priests and teachers from Istria to Yugoslavia or other areas. In 1927, a law was passed that Italianised Slavic names in Istria. In response to these, the anti-Italian nationalist organisation TIGR (a Slovene acronym for Trieste (Trst), Istria (Istra), Gorizia (Gorica) and Rijeka (Reka).) was founded.
Following the end of World War II, Istria was divided between the newly-created Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Free Territory of Trieste in north-western Istria, which was then divided between Yugoslavia and Italy. Following the division, up to 40,000 Istrian Italians chose to leave the Yugoslav partition.[5] Following World War II, around 350,000 Italians chose to leave Istria and Dalmatia.[6] Many Italian communists also immigrated to Istria, believing that Yugoslavia was the only place where they could build socialism. However, they were accused of deviationism by the Yugoslav government and many were sent to concentration camps.[7]
Since the end of World War II, irredentism has largely disappeared in Istria, in most part because of the Istrian exodus.
Istria is today primarily populated by Croats in Croatian Istria and Slovenes in Slovenian Istria, but a minority of Istrian Italians still exist. The 2002 census in Slovenia recorded 2,258 Italians[8] while the Croatian Istria County and Primorje-Gorski Kotar County combined recorded 13,220 Italians.[9][10]
Italian irredentism
After Napoleon the idea of "unification" of all the Italian people in a "united Italy" started to be developed by intellectuals like the Istrian Carlo Combi. As a consequence, the Italian irredentism promoted the unification of those areas not included in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy after 1861: Istria was one of those.[11]
The irredentist ideas of the Italian nationalists became stronger after the unification of Italy (1861). The main representatives of these ideas in historical writings are Pacifico Valussi and the Istrians Carlo Combi, Tommaso Luciani and Sigismondo Bonfiglio. Opinion about the Slavs had entirely changed: they were seen as peasant folk unable to build a nation of their own and therefore condemned to be assimilated within an Italian identity. And they already envisaged the frontiers of Italy extending to the Oriental Alps and to Arsa, some even to Fiume/Rijeka.[12]
Residents of Fiume cheering the arrival of Gabriele D'Annunzio and his Legionari in September 1919, when Fiume had 22,488 (62% of the population) Italians in a total population of 35,839 inhabitants. Like those of Istria, most of the inhabitants of Fiume cheered the union to Italy after WWI.
Many Italians in Istria supported the Italian Risorgimento and, because of this, the Austrians saw the Italians as enemies and favored the Slavic communities of Istria.[13] During the meeting of the Council of Ministers of 12 November 1866, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria outlined a wide-ranging project aimed at the Germanisation or Slavicisation of the areas of the empire with an Italian presence:[14]
His Majesty expressed the precise order that action be taken decisively against the influence of the Italian elements still present in some regions of the Crown and, appropriately occupying the posts of public, judicial, masters employees as well as with the influence of the press, work in South Tyrol, Dalmatia and Littoral for the Germanization and Slavization of these territories according to the circumstances, with energy and without any regard. His Majesty calls the central offices to the strong duty to proceed in this way to what has been established.
—Franz Joseph I of Austria, Council of the Crown of 12 November 1866[15][16]
This created a huge wave of emigration of Italians from Istria before World War I, reducing their percentage inside the peninsula inhabitants (they were more than 50% of the total population for centuries,[17] but at the end of the 19th century they were reduced to only two fifth according to some estimates).
Indeed, in 1910, the ethnic and linguistic composition was completely mixed and the Italians were reduced to a minority in the Austrian province of Istria (even if huge). According to the Austrian census results, out of 404,309 inhabitants in the "Margravate of Istria", 168,116 (41.6%) spoke Croatian, 147,416 (36.5%) spoke Italian, 55,365 (13.7%) spoke Slovene, 13,279 (3.3%) spoke German, 882 (0.2%) spoke Romanian, 2,116 (0.5%) spoke other languages and 17,135 (4.2%) were non-citizens, which had not been asked for their language of communication.
Ethnic maps of Istria
The Italian community in Istria (38%) was concentrated on its western coast. Croats formed the majority in the rest of the peninsula, with Slovenes in the north.
ethnically Croat-majority territory
But scholars like Matteo Bartoli complained that these census percentages included areas outside Istria (like the island of Veglia/Krk and the city of Castua/Kastav, a mostly Croatian town situated north of Fiume and outside the real Istrian peninsula): in his opinion the peninsula of Istria was still with a majority of Italians during World War I.[18] Generally speaking, Italians lived on coast, while Croats and Slovenes lived inland.
In the second half of the 19th century, a clash of new ideological movements, Italian irredentism (which claimed Trieste and Istria) and Slovene and Croatian nationalism (developing individual identities in some quarters whilst seeking to unite in a South Slavic bid in others), resulted in growing ethnic conflict between Italians one side and Slovenes and Croats in opposition. This was intertwined with the class and religious conflict, as inhabitants of towns and western agricultural lands were mostly Italian, whilst Croats or Slovenes largely lived out in the countryside and elsewhere.
Slav priests had an important role (in the ethnic conflict)... they, controlling the official church registration of the names, did many abuses (changing to slav many Italian family names).... In 1877 the Italian deputy to the Vienna Parliament Francesco Sbisà denounced the transformation of Italian names and surnames to Slavic ones.... In 1897 Matteo Bartoli, a linguist from Rovigno, pinpointed that 20,000 names were changed with this forgery, mainly in eastern Istria and even in some Dalmatian islands.[19]
Capodistria was the center of Italian nationalism in Istria. In it, there was the main Comitato istriano (Istrian Committee for Union to Italy), the meeting place of famous Istrian irredentists like Carlo Combi and Antonio Madonizza. From there, many Istrian italians went to fight for Venice against the Austrians in the Legione Istriano-dalmata.
After 1866, when Venice and the Veneto region were united to Italy, there was widespread support for unification of Istria with Italy as well. Tino Gavardo, Pio Riego Gambini and Nazario Sauro where the most renowned between those who promoted the Istrian unification to Italy. Many of them enrolled voluntarily in the Italian Army during World War I against the Austrian Empire. Some, namely Nazario Sauro, were later captured, trialed for treason and executed in Austria.[20]
In 1913 Pio Riego Gambini, Luigi Bilucaglia e Piero Almerigogna created the Fascio Giovanile Istriano.[21]
After Istria was united to Italy, following the Italian victory during World War I,[22] some Istrian irredentists reached high levels of importance inside the Italian government, like general Vittorio Italico Zupelli, who was appointed minister.
After World War II, there was a huge exodus of Italian speaking people from Istria.
There is a growing movement in Italy (and Europe) toward asking for the official recognition of "genocide" or even democide of the Italians in Istria (as it has been done with the Armenian genocide done by the Turks).[23]
Dalmatia is one of the four historical regions of Croatia, alongside Central Croatia, Slavonia and Istria, located on the east shore of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia.
Istria is the largest peninsula within the Adriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Kvarner Gulf. It is shared by three countries: Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy, with 90% of surface area being part of Croatia. Croatia encapsulates most of the Istrian peninsula within Istria County.
The Free Territory of Trieste was an independent territory in Southern Europe between northern Italy and Yugoslavia, facing the north part of the Adriatic Sea, under direct responsibility of the United Nations Security Council in the aftermath of World War II. For a period of seven years, it acted as a free city.
Italian irredentism was a political movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Italy with irredentist goals which promoted the unification of geographic areas in which indigenous peoples were considered to be ethnic Italians. At the beginning, the movement promoted the annexation to Italy of territories where Italians formed the absolute majority of the population, but retained by the Austrian Empire after the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866. During World War I the main "irredent lands" were considered to be the provinces of Trento and Trieste and, in a narrow sense, irredentists referred to the Italian patriots living in these two areas.
The Julian March, also called Julian Venetia, is an area of southern Central Europe which is currently divided among Croatia, Italy, and Slovenia. The term was coined in 1863 by the Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, a native of the area, to demonstrate that the Austrian Littoral, Veneto, Friuli, and Trentino shared a common Italian linguistic identity. Ascoli emphasized the Augustan partition of Roman Italy at the beginning of the Empire, when Venetia et Histria was Regio X.
The Istrian–Dalmatian exodus was the post-World War II exodus and departure of local ethnic Italians as well as ethnic Slovenes and Croats from Yugoslavia. The emigrants, who had lived in the now Yugoslav territories of the Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, largely went to Italy, but some joined the Italian diaspora in the Americas, Australia and South Africa. These regions were ethnically mixed, with long-established historic Croatian, Italian, and Slovene communities. After World War I, the Kingdom of Italy annexed Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and parts of Dalmatia including the city of Zadar. At the end of World War II, under the Allies' Treaty of Peace with Italy, the former Italian territories in Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and Dalmatia were assigned to now Communist-helmed Federal Yugoslavia, except for the Province of Trieste. The former territories absorbed into Yugoslavia are part of present-day Croatia and Slovenia.
Nazario Sauro was an Austrian-born Italian irredentist and sailor.
Grožnjan is a settlement and municipality in Croatia. It is part of Croatia's Istria County, which takes up most of the Istrian peninsula. 39% of the municipality's population has Italian ethnicity.
Croatisation or Croatization is a process of cultural assimilation, and its consequences, in which people or lands ethnically only partially Croatian or non-Croatian become Croatian.
Dalmatian Italians are the historical Italian national minority living in the region of Dalmatia, now part of Croatia and Montenegro.
The Italian language is an official minority language in Croatia, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. Croatia's proximity and cultural connections to Italy have led to a relatively large presence of Italians in Croatia. Italians were recognized as a state minority in the Croatian Constitution in two sections: Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Although only 0.43% of the total population is Italian by citizenship, many more are ethnically Italian and a large percentage of Croatians speak Italian, in addition to Croatian.
The Italian language is an officially recognized minority language in Slovenia, along with Hungarian. Around 3,700 Slovenian citizens speak Italian as their mother tongue, mostly Istrian Italians. Italian has a strong presence in Slovenia, both historical and current. An estimated 15% of Slovenians speak Italian as a second language, which is one of the highest percentages in the European Union.
The Autonomist Party was an Italian-Dalmatianist political party in the Dalmatian political scene, that existed for around 70 years of the 19th century and until World War I. Its goal was to maintain the autonomy of the Kingdom of Dalmatia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as opposed to the unification with the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia. The Autonomist Party has been accused of secretly having been a pro-Italian movement due to their defense of the rights of ethnic Italians in Dalmatia. The Autonomist Party did not claim to be an Italian movement, and indicated that it sympathized with a sense of heterogeneity amongst Dalmatians in opposition to ethnic nationalism. In the 1861 elections, the Autonomists won twenty-seven seats in Dalmatia, while Dalmatia's Croatian nationalist movement, the National Party, won only fourteen seats. This number rapidly decreased: already in 1870 autonomists lost their majority in the Diet, while in 1908 they won just 6 out of 43 seats.
The foibe massacres, or simply the foibe, refers to mass killings and deportations both during and immediately after World War II, mainly committed by Yugoslav Partisans and OZNA in the then-Italian territories of Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, against local Italians and Slavs, primarily members of fascist and collaborationist forces, and civilians opposed to the new Yugoslav authorities. The term refers to some victims who were thrown alive into the foibe., deep natural sinkholes characteristic of the Karst Region. In a wider or symbolic sense, some authors used the term to apply to all disappearances or killings of Italian and Slavic people in the territories occupied by Yugoslav forces. Others included deaths resulting from the forced deportation of Italians, or those who died while trying to flee from these contested lands.
Josip Vilfan or Wilfan was a Slovene lawyer, politician, and human rights activist from Trieste. In the early 1920s, he was one of the political leaders of the Slovene and Croatian minority in the Italian-administered Julian March. Together with Engelbert Besednjak, Lavo Čermelj and Ivan Marija Čok, he was the most influential representative of the Slovene émigrés from the Slovenian Littoral during the 1930s. Next to Leonid Pitamic and Boris Furlan, Vilfan is considered one of the most important Slovene legal theorists of the first half of the 20th century.
Istrian Italians are an ethnic group from the Adriatic region of Istria in modern northwestern Croatia and southwestern Slovenia. Istrian Italians descend from the original Latinized population of Roman Histria, from the Venetian-speaking settlers who colonized the region during the time of the Republic of Venice, and from the local Croatian people who culturally assimilated.
The Imperial Free City of Trieste and its Territory was a possession of the Habsburg monarchy in the Holy Roman Empire from the 14th century to 1806, a constituent part of the German Confederation and the Austrian Littoral from 1849 to 1920, and part of the Italian Julian March until 1922. In 1719 it was declared a free port by Emperor Charles VI; the construction of the Austrian Southern Railway (1841–57) turned it into a bustling seaport, through which much of the exports and imports of the Austrian Lands were channelled. The city administration and economy were dominated by the city's Italian population element; Italian was the language of administration and jurisdiction. In the later 19th and early 20th century, the city attracted the immigration of workers from the city's hinterlands, many of whom were speakers of Slovene.
Italians of Croatia are an autochthonous historical national minority recognized by the Constitution of Croatia. As such, they elect a special representative to the Croatian Parliament. There is the Italian Union of Croatia and Slovenia, which is a Croatian-Slovenian joint organization with its main site in Rijeka, Croatia and its secondary site in Koper, Slovenia.
Istria is the largest peninsula in the Adriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Bay of Kvarner. It is shared by three countries: Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy.
Italian irredentism in Dalmatia was the political movement supporting the unification to Italy, during the 19th and 20th centuries, of Adriatic Dalmatia.
↑ Arrigo Petacco, The exodus. The story of the Italian population of Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, Mondadori, Milan, 1999. English translation.
↑ Die Protokolle des Österreichischen Ministerrates 1848/1867. V Abteilung: Die Ministerien Rainer und Mensdorff. VI Abteilung: Das Ministerium Belcredi, Wien, Österreichischer Bundesverlag für Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Kunst 1971, vol. 2, p. 297. Citazione completa della fonte e traduzione in Luciano Monzali, Italiani di Dalmazia. Dal Risorgimento alla Grande Guerra, Le Lettere, Firenze 2004, p. 69.)
↑ Die Protokolle des Österreichischen Ministerrates 1848/1867. V Abteilung: Die Ministerien Rainer und Mensdorff. VI Abteilung: Das Ministerium Belcredi, Wien, Österreichischer Bundesverlag für Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Kunst 1971
Bartoli, Matteo. Le parlate italiane della Venezia Giulia e della Dalmazia. Tipografia italo-orientale. Grottaferrata, 1919.
Benussi, Bernardo. L' Istria nei suoi due millenni di storia. Treves-Zanichelli. Trieste, 1924.
D'Alessio, Vanni. Il cuore conteso. Il nazionalismo in una comunità multietnica nell'Istria asburgica. Filema Edizioni, Napoli, 2003.
Petacco, Arrigo. A tragedy revealed: the story of the Italian population of Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, 1943-1956. University of Toronto Press. Toronto, 2005. ISBN0802039219.
Pignatti Morano, Carlo. La vita di Nazario Sauro ed il martirio dell'eroe. Fratelli Treves Editori, Milano, 1922.
Večerina, Duško. Talijanski Iredentizam (Italian Irredentism). ISBN953-98456-0-2. Zagreb, 2001.
Vignoli, Giulio. I territori italofoni non appartenenti alla Repubblica Italiana. Giuffrè Editoriale. Milano, 1995.
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