The tragedy of the sinkholes and the exodus in a historical essay with the «Corriere»- Corriere.it

“Bitter Adriatic”, a slogan coined by Gabriele D’Annunzio, was chosen by Raoul Pupo, the major historian of twentieth-century events on the eastern border of Italy, as the title of the book that goes out on newsstands tomorrow with the «Corriere» on the occasion of Remembrance Day, at the price of And 9.90 plus the cost of the newspaper.

A hinge land between the Italian, Slavic and Germanic worlds, what we call Venezia Giulia, according to the definition of the nineteenth-century glottologist Graziadio Ascoli, was the epicenter of a fierce struggle between nationalisms of which a peaceful and industrious population has paid the price.

Pupo’s story begins with Guglielmo Oberdan’s failed attention to Franz Joseph. Oberdan, actually Oberdank, of a Slovenian mother, first martyr of irredentism, hanged on 20 December 1882 in the Great Barracks of Trieste, is the demonstration of how much national identity in those parts has always been a cultural fact, of choice, not dictated by blood or by the sound of the surname. The fact remains that for a long season the confrontation between the various groups has since undergone an unstoppable escalation. The anti-Italian pogroms in Trieste date back to 23 May 1915, the eve of entry into the war. The victory changed everything, not only with the annexation of Trieste, Istria and Zara sanctioned by the treaty of Rapallo of 1920, but with the advance of an increasingly aggressive nationalism witnessed by the fire at Narodni Dom, the home of Slavic community of Trieste, of 13 July 1920. An attack led by the Tuscan fascist Francesco Giunta. Meanwhile D’Annunzio’s adventure in Fiume was drawing to a closewhich would become Italian with the Treaty of Rome of 1924.

The anti-Slavic character of border fascism manifested itself with the laws that forbade teaching in languages ​​other than Italian, in the suppression of the Slavic schools, in the repression of the clergy who in part became the protagonist of the Slovenian and Croatian national revival. The birth of the first clandestine formations that carried out bloody attacks in Trieste and Istria fits into this picture. Tigr (acronym for Trieste, Istria, Gorizia and Rijeka, i.e. Fiume) and Borba (struggle) were the names of the first formations born from a trip by young people to Monte Nevoso. Their actions, attacks in Trieste, in which by the way came killed a journalist of «Il popolo di Trieste», and an armed attack on Pazin peasants who went to the polls for the plebiscite of 1929, were severely punished. Four of the 87 arrested were sentenced to death, including Ferdo Bidovec, of an Italian mother. The place of execution was the Basovizza shooting range. Not far from that mine where in May 1945 the bodies of a few hundred Italians killed by Tito’s police were thrown. The victims were not only fascists, but also suspected anti-fascists who ended up on the lists of the Ozna, the Yugoslav secret service.

It is no coincidence that the most significant symbolic act of reconciliation between Slovenians and Italians took place in Basovizza on 13 July 2020 where the presidents Sergio Mattarella and Borut Pahor, holding hands, paid tribute to the victims of the two fronts. An act of concord strongly underlined by the author.

Pupo dedicates long and intense chapters to the two seasons of the sinkholes, that of autumn 1943, which had Istria as its theater and has as its symbol the student Norma Cossetto, daughter of the mayor of Visinada, kidnapped, raped and thrown into the sinkhole of Villa Surani , and that of May 1945, when a ferocious showdown took place in Trieste, Gorizia and Fiume and throughout the Venezia Giulia area in which it was not only the fascists who paid. The objective of the Tito forces was threefold: to punish crimes, to purge society of uncomfortable elements and to intimidate the Italian component. However for Pupo, according to which the Italian civilian victims were no more than five thousand, one cannot speak of genocide, but of massacres and national replacement. Tito had a heavier hand with the Slovenian collaborators or with the Croatian Ustasha (the victims range from 60 to 70 thousand) and as regards the Italians, his right-hand man Edvard Kardelj recommended that they be punished on the basis of fascism and not on nationality. But the methods used were very harsh and in the end, out of fear and patriotic sentiment, about 300,000 Italians, over 80 percent of the residents, abandoned their fathers’ homes, leaving places where their families had been rooted for centuries.

It is Pupo himself who spoke on another occasion of a “demographic catastrophe”. Exemplary is the exodus from Pola, where almost everyone left, 28,000 inhabitants out of about 30,000, after the Vergarolla massacre of 18 August 1946: over a hundred dead on the city beach from the explosion of submarine mines that were defused. A probable attack, the first of many unsolved mysteries in republican history, because the episode took place after the referendum of June 2, 1946 and before the peace treaty of February 10, 1947, when those lands were ceded to Yugoslavia.

Among the many interesting pages of this essay, which concludes with the London Memorandum of 1954the passage of Trieste to Italy and the exodus from zone B, we cannot fail to mention those on relations between the communist parties, where the subordination of the PCI with respect to its Slovenian brother emerges, also thanks to the directives that came from Moscow and Georgi Dimitrov.

The policy of broad agreements inaugurated by Palmiro Togliatti with the recognition of the Badoglio government it did not apply on the eastern border, where the ancient logic of front against front and the fight against the enemy hidden even in the anti-fascist ranks was in force. The partisans of the Osoppo Brigade paid the price, including Francesco De Gregori, the singer’s uncle, and Guido Pasolini, the poet’s brother, killed by the “Garibaldini” of the commander Mario Toffanin (known as Giacca) because they combined patriotism and anti-fascism.

Tito’s partisans led a liberation struggle from Nazi-fascisma social revolution and at the same time they pursued objectives of national conquest that had roots in the irredentisms of the late nineteenth century.

Storms of history. Battle ground on totalitarian ideologies

The book by Raoul Pupo will be released on Friday 10 February with the «Corriere della Sera» Very bitter Adriatic
. A long history of violence, at the price of 9.90 euros plus the cost of the newspaper. The volume, published in collaboration with the publisher Laterza on the occasion of the Day of Remembrance for the sinkholes and the Julian-Dalmatian exodus, will remain on newsstands for a month. Pupo’s essay, summarizing and summarizing the results of long research, reconstructs the events that affected the eastern border between the final part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. The Adriatic lands, the author observes in this regard in the introduction, “constituted in many respects a laboratory of extreme political experiences of the twentieth century”. Fascism, Nazism and Communism passed through here, with particularly dramatic results. And even earlier, different national identities met and clashed. On the other hand, the upper Adriatic is, Pupo always writes, «a typical area of ​​overlap between suburbs, in this case of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic world, with some Magyar incursions». Thus there has been an interweaving of national conflicts and ideological conflicts, of which the civilian populations have often been victims. Two world wars have sown mourning and exacerbated resentments. The suffering to which Remembrance Day is dedicated must be traced back to the second of them. There is talk of the sinkholes, natural cavities of the karst territory into which the Yugoslav partisans of Tito, whose country had been invaded by the Axis forces, often threw their opponents, including many Italians. And then the exodus of about 30,000 of our compatriots from the lands that were annexed to Yugoslavia following the peace treaty.