TIGR (an acronym of the place-names Trst, Istra, Gorica, and Reka), fully the Revolutionary Organization of the Julian March T.I.G.R. (Slovene: Revolucionarna organizacija Julijske krajine T.I.G.R.), was a militantanti-fascist and insurgent organization established as a response to the FascistItalianization of the Slovene and Croat people on part of the former Austro-Hungarian territories that became part of Italy after the First World War, and were known at the time as the Julian March. It is considered one of the first anti-fascist resistance movements in Europe.[1][2] It was active between 1927 and 1941.
Memorial plaque to TIGR activists in Ocizla on the Karst Plateau who were active in the 1930s
Background
The Treaty of Rapallo and the Italianization of ethnic Slovene areas that included a quarter of Slovene ethnic territory and approximately 327,000 out of a total population of 1.3 million Slovenes, on the map of present-day Slovenia with its traditional regions' boundaries.
While the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was a multi-national empire, which allowed a relatively large degree of cultural autonomy to the different peoples and ethnic groups, Italy was a nation state, and its governments had little intention of allowing the existence of separate national movements and identities on its territories. Issues regarding the use of the Slovene and Croatian languages in public administration and in the educational system, therefore, became the main point of contention between the Italian authorities and the Slovene and Croatian minorities.
After the Fascist movement came to power in 1922, anti-Slavic policies were enforced as part of Italianization. In 1923, the use of Slovene and Croatian in all public offices, including post offices and means of public transport, was prohibited. In the same year, the Gentile reform declared Italian as the only language of public education; by 1928, all Slovene and Croatian schools, including private ones, were closed down. In 1925, the use of Slovene and Croatian was prohibited in the courts of law. All Slovene and Croatian names of towns and settlements were Italianized. By 1927, all public use of Slovene and Croatian was prohibited. It was prohibited to give children Slavic names, and all Slavic-sounding surnames were administratively given an Italian-sounding form. The Fascist Italianization prohibited Slavic inscriptions on gravestones.[citation needed]
By 1927, all Slovene and Croatian associations—not only political ones, but also cultural, educational and sport associations—were dissolved, as were all financial and economic institutions in the hands of the Slovene and Croatian minority. Starting in 1928, the state law also started limiting the use of Slovene and Croatian in the churches, and in 1934, all use of Slovene and Croatian in Roman Catholic liturgy (including singing and sermons) was prohibited.
Under the effect of this policy, tens of thousands emigrated abroad, mostly to Yugoslavia and South America.
Composition and activity
Its membership consisted of radical (mostly national liberal) Slovene youth from former Austrian Littoral, and a few Croats of Istria, where its support was much weaker. Many members of this organization were connected with Yugoslav and British intelligence services and many of them were militarily trained.[5][6] The aim of the organization was to fight violent Fascist Italianization and to achieve the annexation of Istria, the Slovenian Littoral and Rijeka to Yugoslavia.
The TIGR carried out several bomb attacks on Italian and German soil,[6] as well as assassinations of Italian military personnel, police forces, civil servants and prominent members of the National Fascist Party.[7] It also planned a popular uprising against the Fascist regime, which was however never carried out.[8] Because of these actions, it was treated as a terrorist organization by the Italian state.
The first organized anti-Fascist resistance activities in the Julian March began in the mid 1920s in the easternmost districts of the region (around Postojna and Ilirska Bistrica), on the border with Yugoslavia. Local Slovene activists established contacts with the Yugoslav nationalist organization Orjuna, launching first attacks at Italian military and police personnel. These were however still mostly individual actions, without an organizational background. The connections between the Slovene anti-Fascist activists and the Orjuna were soon broken due to a different ideological agenda.
In September 1927, a group of Slovene liberal nationalist activists met on the Nanos Plateau above the Vipava Valley, and decided to form an insurgence organization called TIGR, an abbreviation of the names for Trieste, Istria, Gorizia, and Rijeka. A few months later, another meeting took place in Trieste, where a group connected to the former established the organization Borba (Fight), which also included some Croat activists from Istria.[12] From the very beginning, the two groups worked in close alliance.
The two organization were formed mostly by Slovene progressive nationalist youngsters from Trieste, the Karst Plateau, Inner Carniola, and the Tolmin district. Between 1927 and 1930, the organization launched numerous attacks on individual members or supporters of the National Fascist Party (both Italian and Slovene), and also killed several members of repressive forces: carabinieri, border guards, military personnel.
In the Gorizia region, the TIGR organization restrained from openly violent actions, and focused mostly on propaganda and on illegal educational, cultural and political activity among larger strata of the population. The Gorizia section of the TIGR established close connections with the underground Catholic network organized by Christian Socialist activists, centered around the lawyer Janko Kralj and priest Virgil Šček.
In Istria, the TIGR cell was led by Vladimir Gortan, a Croat activist from Beram (near Pazin).[13] Differently from most Slovene cells, Gortan opted for open demonstrative actions, such as attacks on police convoys. In March 1929, during the Fascist plebiscite, when he raided a polling station near the town of Pazin, killing one peasant. Soon afterwards, he was caught by the Italian police and executed.
On 10 February 1930, in the headquarters of the newspaper Il Popolo di Trieste, the TIGR places a bomb killing the editor Guido Neri. Three other journalists and typographers remained injured.[14]
After the trial of 1930, the organization quickly re-organized itself under the leadership of Albert Rejec and Danilo Zelen. It expanded its membership and shifted its tactics. Instead of demonstrative attacks on symbolic figures and institutions of Fascist repression, they opted for targeted attacks on infrastructure and high-ranking military, militia and police personnel. They also built a wide intelligence network, and established contacts with British and Yugoslav intelligence services. Ideological propaganda was intensified.
While in the late 1920s, the organization had close connection with radical Yugoslav nationalist movements, such as ORJUNA, after the reorganization in the 1930s it adopted a more left wing ideology. Several connections with Italian anti-Fascist organizations were established (including with the organisation Giustizia e Libertà). In 1935, TIGR signed an agreement of co-operation with the Communist Party of Italy. The TIGR nevertheless tried to remain above all ideological divisions, maintaining a close relationship with the local Slovene and Croat Roman Catholic lower clergy and grassroots organizations in Istria and the Slovenian Littoral.
Among the actions planned by the organization, the most daring and far-reaching was probably the attempt on Benito Mussolini's life in 1938. The plan was supposed to be carried out in 1938, when the dictator visited Kobarid (then officially known as Caporetto). The plan was put off at the last minute, most probably because of the pressure by the British intelligence, which opposed such an action in times when Mussolini was conducting an active role in the negotiations that led to the Munich agreement.
After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, the TIGR expanded its activity to neighboring Nazi Germany, focusing primarily on bomb actions against crucial infrastructure: railways, and high-voltage power lines. The actions led to a thorough investigation by the Fascist regime, which disclosed most of the TIGR cells in 1940/1941.
In 1941 several members of TIGR were condemned for espionage and terrorism at the Second Trieste trial; four of them (Viktor Bobek, Ivan Ivančič, Simon Kos and Ivan Vadnal) were executed in Villa Opicina near Trieste the same year, jointly with the Communist activist Pinko Tomažič. By the time of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, most of the organization was already dismantled by both Italian and Nazi German secret police and most of its prominent members either sent to concentration camps, killed or exiled. On May 13, 1941, in the hills above Podtabor, three TIGR members carried out the first armed resistance against Axis forces in Slovenian territory during the Second World War,[15][16] in which Danilo Zelen (1907–1941) was the first Slovenian to die in combat resisting the Axis forces.[17]
After the establishment of the Communist regime in Yugoslavia in 1945, most former TIGR members were removed from public life. The Yugoslav secret police continued to closely monitor some of TIGR's members up to the 1970s. Their activity was removed from the official historical accounts.
In the late 1970s, the first historical accounts on the activity of the TIGR started to appear. Only in the 1980s, however, did their resistance activity started to be appreciated again, with several historical books written on the matter. The historian Milica Kacin Wohinz was one of the first to produce a thorough study of the movement in a monograph entitled "The First Anti-Fascism in Europe", and published in 1990.
Throughout the 1990s, the history of TIGR received increased publicity and started to be mentioned in public speeches. In 1994, the Association for the Nourishment of Patriotic Traditions of the Slovenian Littoral Organization TIGR (colloquially known as the "Association TIGR" or "Patriotic Association TIGR") was formed in Postojna, and eventually became the main promoter of the positive evaluation of the TIGR legacy.
Kobarid is a settlement in Slovenia, the administrative centre of the Municipality of Kobarid.
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.
Sežana is a town in the Slovenian Littoral region of Slovenia, near the border with Italy. It is the seat of the Municipality of Sežana. Sežana is located on the Karst Plateau, 17 kilometres from Trieste, Italy, and 80 km (50 mi) from Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia.
United Slovenia is the name originally given to an unrealized political programme of the Slovene national movement, formulated during the Spring of Nations in 1848. The programme demanded (a) unification of all the Slovene-inhabited areas into one single kingdom under the rule of the Austrian Empire, (b) equal rights of Slovene in public, and (c) strongly opposed the planned integration of the Habsburg monarchy with the German Confederation. The programme failed to meet its main objectives, but it remained the common political program of all currents within the Slovene national movement until World War I.
Štefan "Stevo" Žigon was a Yugoslav actor, theatre director, and writer.
The Slovene Littoral, or simply Littoral, is one of the traditional regions of Slovenia. The littoral in its name – for a coastal-adjacent area – recalls the former Austrian Littoral, the Habsburg possessions on the upper Adriatic coast, of which the Slovene Littoral was part. Today, the Littoral is often associated with the Slovenian ethnic territory that, in the first half of the 20th century, found itself in Italy to the west of the Rapallo Border, which separated a quarter of Slovenes from the rest of the nation, and was strongly influenced by Italian fascism.
Jože Pirjevec, registered at birth Giuseppe Pierazzi because of the Italianization policy under the Fascist regime, is a Slovene–Italian historian and a prominent diplomatic historian of the west Balkans region, as well as a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Marta Verginella is a Slovenian historian from the Slovene minority in Italy in Trieste, notable as one of the most prominent contemporary Slovene historians. Together with Alenka Puhar, she is considered a pioneer in the history of family relations in the Slovene Lands.
Milica Kacin Wohinz was a Slovenian historian best known for her seminal study on the history of the forceful Italianization of the Slovene minority in Italy (1920–1947) that took place between 1918 and 1943.
Josip Ferfolja was a Slovene lawyer and Social democratic politician, and human rights activist from the Province of Gorizia. Although he was an Italian citizen for most of his life, he considered himself foremost a Slovenian.
Engelbert Besednjak was a Slovene Christian Democrat politician, lawyer and journalist. In the 1920s, he was one of the leaders of the Slovene and Croat minority in the Italian-administered Julian March. In the 1930s, he was one of the leaders of Slovene anti-Fascist émigrés from the Slovenian Littoral, together with Josip Vilfan, Ivan Marija Čok and Lavo Čermelj.
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.
Podtabor is a settlement in the southern part of the Municipality of Dobrepolje in Slovenia. The area is part of the historical region of Lower Carniola. The municipality is now included in the Central Slovenia Statistical Region.
The Slovene Partisans, formally the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Slovenia, were part of Europe's most effective anti-Nazi resistance movement led by Yugoslav revolutionary communists during World War II, the Yugoslav Partisans. Since a quarter of Slovene ethnic territory and approximately 327,000 out of total population of 1.3 million Slovenes were subjected to forced Italianization since the end of the First World War, the objective of the movement was the establishment of the state of Slovenes that would include the majority of Slovenes within a socialist Yugoslav federation in the postwar period.
Janko Premrl was a Slovene Partisan.
The Trieste National Hall or Slovene Cultural Centre in Trieste was a multimodal building that served for 15 years as a social and economic centre for the Slovene minority in the city. It included the Slovene theatre in Trieste, a hotel, a restaurant, a gym and numerous cultural associations. It is notable for having been burned in 1920 by Italian Fascists, which made it a symbol of the Italian repression of the Slovene minority in Italy. The building was restored from 1988 to 1990. and later used as a hotel. Around 2010 it has been renovated according to the original plans.
The Slovene minority in Italy (1920–1947) was the indigenous Slovene population—approximately 327,000 out of a total population of 1.3 million ethnic Slovenes at the time—that was cut from the remaining three-quarters of the Slovene ethnic community after the First World War. According to the secret Treaty of London and the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920, the former Austrian Littoral and western part of the former Inner Carniola of defeated Austria-Hungary were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. Whereas only a few thousand Italians were left in the new South Slavic state, a population of half a million Slavs, both Slovenes and Croats, was subjected to forced Italianization until the fall of Fascism in Italy. After the Second World War, most of the region known as the Slovenian Littoral was transferred to Yugoslavia under the terms of the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947.
World War II in the Slovene Lands started in April 1941 and lasted until May 1945. The Slovene Lands were in a unique situation during World War II in Europe. In addition to being trisected, a fate which also befell Greece, Drava Banovina was the only region that experienced a further step—absorption and annexation into neighboring Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Hungary. The Slovene-settled territory was divided largely between Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, with smaller territories occupied and annexed by Hungary and the Independent State of Croatia.
Slovene minority in Italy, also known as Slovenes in Italy is the name given to Italian citizens who belong to the autochthonous Slovene ethnic and linguistic minority living in the Italian autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The vast majority of members of the Slovene ethnic minority live in the Provinces of Trieste, Gorizia, and Udine. Estimates of their number vary significantly; the official figures show 52,194 Slovenian speakers in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, as per the 1971 census, but Slovenian estimates speak of 83,000 to 100,000 people.
The Municipality of Divača is a municipality in the Littoral region of Slovenia, near the Italian border. The seat of the municipality is the town of Divača. The municipality was established on 6 November 1994, when the former Municipality of Sežana was dissolved into four smaller municipalities. Škocjan Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is located in the municipality.
References
↑ Milica Kacin Wohinz, Prvi antifašizem v Evropi. Primorska 1925-1935 (Koper: Lipa, 1990)
↑ Ferenc, Tone (1992). "Mala Gora". Enciklopedija Slovenije. Vol.6. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga. p.382. Boj na M. g. je bil prvi oboroženi spopad z okupatorjem v osrednji Sloveniji.
↑ Fajfar, Simona. "Bitka na Mali gori je zaveza za prihodnost". Delo. Retrieved April 27, 2022. 13. maja 1941 se je na Mali Gori pri Ribnici zgodil prvi oboroženi spopad Slovencev, pripadnikov organizacije TIGR, z okupatorjem
↑ "Zelen, Danilo (1907–1941)". Slovenska biografija. Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti. Retrieved April 27, 2022. Z. je prvi Slov., ki je padel v boju z okupatorjem na Slov.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
