Marco Polo a Croat? A Ridiculous Thesis

(Taken from the magazine “Storia in rete”, October 26, 2012)

“We have never even considered the idea of Marco Polo being a Croat”.

So says Luca Molà regarding the recent Croatian attempt to steal one of the most famous and beloved Italian figures in history. Molà is one of the curators of the exhibition “On the Silk Road: Ancient Paths Between East and West”, open to the public since October 26 and presented to the press today, an exhibition that obviously devotes much space to the Venetian merchant, who more than any other symbolizes the contacts between Italy and China at the turn of the Way Silk. The fact that Zagreb has opened a museum in Curzola in which they claim Polo was of Slavic origin, and the fact that a group of Croatian editors from the other side of the Adriatic have tried to impose their revisionist fantasies on Wikipedia in other languages, does not worry Molà:

“It's not like Columbus, where there there exists some room for speculation. We know everything about Polo's family: we know where their home was, we have birth certificates and other documents. There is no doubt that the Polo family were Venetian patricians.”

Dalmatia, where the island of Curzola is located, was still in the High Middle Ages inhabited by people of Latin origin and Latin culture, and the Slavic invasions did not have a demographic impact on the coastal cities and islands.

40 Days of Trieste: Slavs Celebrate a Communist Dictator

May 2, 2016 — Fountain of San Giusto in Trieste, Italy
Vandalized by Communists with Yugoslav Red Star

On May 1, 1945 the Yugoslav Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, entered the city of Trieste and began the brutal 42-day occupation known in Italian historiography as the “40 days of Trieste”. During these days the Yugoslavs committed many massacres and atrocities. Several thousand Italians from Trieste disappeared – simply vanished without a trace. Later it was discovered that many were arrested and sent to Yugoslav concentration camps, from which they never returned, while the rest were murdered and dumped in mass graves (part of the Foibe Massacres). The Italian population was terrorized in various other ways as well.

A May 8, 1945 memorandum published by the US State Department stated:

“The Yugoslavs are even trying to establish civil control in the eastern part of Udine, the Italian province beyond Venezia Giulia. In Trieste the Yugoslavs are using all the familiar tactics of terror. Every Italian of any importance is being arrested. Yugoslavs have taken over complete control and are conscripting Italians for forced labor, seizing the banks and other valuable property, and requisitioning grain and other supplies on a large scale. The Archbishop of Gorizia and other priests have been arrested, and many others are threatened.”

The northeastern region of Italy is a graveyard, filled with thousands of victims of ethnic cleansing who perished at the hands of the Yugoslavs during and after the Second World War. During Tito's occupation, the city of Trieste was transformed into one large concentration camp. Just as the Slavs had done in Dalmatia, Istria, Fiume and the rest of Julian Venetia, Tito tried to “make Trieste Yugoslav”. He sought to violently ethnically cleanse Trieste of Italians, replace them with Slavic people and annex the city to Yugoslavia. He was only prevented from doing so by the Western Allies, who assumed control of the city on June 12, 1945.

Trieste remained under Allied occupation until October 26, 1954, when it was finally reunited with Italy. The return of Trieste to Italy was met with joyous celebrations. Since then, Trieste has remained one of the most patriotic cities in Italy... except for a minority of disgruntled Slovenes who still live in the suburbs outside the Italian city, inhabited since ancient times by an Italian majority.

May 1, 2016 — Demonstrators with
the Slovene Communist flag (left)
& “Italian” flag with superimposed
Yugoslav Communist symbol (right),
used by Yugoslavs during the
Occupation of Trieste in 1945

On May 1, 2016 – precisely 71 years after the Yugoslavs entered Trieste – groups of Slovenes wielding Slovenian and Yugoslav Communist flags held a procession in Trieste. The flags they were carrying were not merely Yugoslav national flags, but specifically flags of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, one of the constituent republics of Communist Yugoslavia. They were joined by people bearing the Italian flag with the Yugoslav red star superimposed over it (the same used by Tito's troops when they occupied Trieste), and by a group of Communists holding a banner (written in Italian and Slovene) of the Communist Refoundation Party.

The nostalgic demonstrators marched to show their support for Communism and Tito. The same Tito who founded a Communist dictatorship and led a country built on genocide and terror; the same Tito who targeted Italians for ethnic cleansing; the same Tito who led bands of partisans who committed innumerable massacres, rapes and violent crimes throughout Italian territory; the same Tito who later even imprisoned thousands of left-wing Italians and their families from Trieste and the Julian region (most of whom were socialists and supporters of Tito who naively volunteered to work in the “Socialist utopia” of Yugoslavia) and deported them to the Goli Otok concentration camp, a Yugoslav Gulag located in modern Croatia.

On May 2, 2016, a day after the nostalgic parade, the fountain on the Hill of San Giusto, in the heart of Trieste, was vandalized when someone pinned a large red star – the Communist symbol of ex-Yugoslavia – to the monument. The red star is a symbol of terror which recalls the painful memory of the occupation of Trieste, the Foibe genocide, Yugoslav gulags, concentration camps, and the expulsion of 350,000 Italians from their homes in Julian Venetia and Dalmatia.

May 1, 2016 — Banner of the Communist Refoundation Party,
written in Italian and Slovenian (Photo by Luca Marsi)

Marching in the streets and vandalizing Italian monuments: these actions are a provocation on the part of the Slavs in Italy, specifically the Slovenes, who still harbor hatred for the Italians and dream of Yugoslav imperialism. This is not the first time this has happened either, far from it. This is only the most recent demonstration of political agitation and provocation by the Slovenes. There have been many dozens of other actions in the past whereby the Slovenes demonstrated their hatred for Italy, hatred for Italians, and support for extremist nationalism and Communism, which is still very much alive and prevalent among the South Slavs today.

It is emblematic that since 2011 the President of the Communal Council of Trieste has been Iztok Furlanič, a Slovene (the first ever to hold this post), descendant of Partisans, who is also a Titoist and provincial secretary of the Communist Party. This would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, but this is the current twisted political climate in which the Italian people are forced to live.

Holding a Titoist demonstration in Trieste, especially on May 1 or April 25 (or any other day), while wielding Yugoslav Communist symbols, is no different than holding a Hitler rally with swastikas at Auschwitz on Holocaust Memorial Day. If such an event were to occur it would immediately make international headlines and the Jews of the world would be horrified and outraged. But when the equivalent takes place in Italy, it barely makes the Italian news, let alone international news.

The Meaning of the Foibe Massacres

The bodies of Italian victims discovered in Albona, Istria, December 1943

The term “Foibe Massacres” owes its meaning to the sinister methods of execution used by the Yugoslav Partisans (primarily Croats, Slovenes and Serbs) during and after the Second World War.

The foibe were mass graves used for collective summary executions, mostly of Italian civilians. Sometimes the victims were shot immediately after their arrest. Other times they were imprisoned in Yugoslav concentration camps, where they suffered inhumane conditions: whippings, beatings, starvation, torture. They were often forced to fight each other for a single piece of bread or for the amusement of their captors. Prisoners were usually killed in pairs, tied to the edge of a pit and mowed down with machine guns.

The Foibe genocide began in Istria in the Fall of 1943, and increased in intensity until June 1945, when the Western Allies assumed control of Trieste. The massacres continued until at least 1947, especially in the area of Istria occupied by the Yugoslav militia of Josip Broz Tito.

It is estimated that the number of Italians killed was as high as 20,000 to 30,000. This included not only Fascists, but also many anti-Fascists, including Italian Partisans of the CLN (National Liberation Committee) who fought alongside their future murderers. The victims also included clergy and even women and children.

The Yugoslavs targeted Italians sometimes on ideological grounds, other times on religious grounds, but above all on ethnic grounds, indiscriminately massacring all who opposed Slavic imperialist designs and the annexation of Julian Venetia to Yugoslavia, making slaughter of both military and civilian, Fascist and anti-Fascist, male and female, adult and child.

The Foibe Massacres were a product of several types of hatred: ethnic, national and ideological, and owes its origins to 19th century Pan-Slavism. It was a brutal revolutionary ethnic cleansing for the purpose of territorial annexation, committed in the name of Yugoslavism, Titoist Communism and Croatian-Slovenian irredentism.

Brief History of Dalmatia in the 19th Century

Curzola, c. 1890-1900

The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of national consciousness in many European peoples (the era of romantic nationalism). The Risorgimento began in Italy, and national consciousness also began to rise in the Balkans, initially in the form of the Pan-Slavism movement.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Illyrian movement, headed by the Croat Ljudevit Gaj, began to spread in Dalmatia. This movement intended to create a single culture and political consciousness among the Southern Slavs. Although it remained confined mostly to Croatian areas, members of the Serb community of Dalmatia also joined them. The Illyrian movement of the early 19th century transformed into the so-called “Croatian national movement” after 1848, which gave rise to the “Croatian popular resurgence” (hrvatski narodni preporod) in Dalmatia and clashes with the dominant Italian Dalmatian community.

Up until that point in Dalmatia, both the Italians and Slavs had had lived without any problems or prejudice, but the birth of Pan-Slavism led to the first tensions between Italians, who were concentrated in the coastal cities (and formed a majority in most of the cities), and the Croats, who had become an overall majority in Dalmatia after the 16th century as a result of plagues which devastated the Romance population, and above all due to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans which had sparked a mass migration of Slav refugees into Venetian territory. At the beginning of the 19th century Italians still formed about 33% (one-third) of the entire Dalmatian population.

Between 1848 and 1918 – especially after the loss of Venetia following the Third Italian War of Independence (1866) – the Austro-Hungarian Empire encouraged the rise of the Slavic ethnicity to counteract the irredentism of the Italian population. During the meeting of the Council of Ministers of 12 November 1866 Emperor Franz Joseph outlined a major project:

“His Majesty has expressed the precise order that we decisively oppose the influence of the Italian element still present in some Crown lands, and to aim unsparingly and without the slightest compunction at the Germanization or Slavicization – depending on the circumstances – of the areas in question, through a suitable entrustment of posts to political magistrates and teachers, as well as through the influence of the press in South Tyrol, Dalmatia, and the Adriatic Coast.”

Regarding the pro-Savic policy of the Imperial government and Franz Joseph's order of Germanization and Slavicization, the observations of Massimo Spinetti, former Italian ambassador in Vienna, in his article “Costantino Nigra ambasciatore a Vienna (1885-1904)”, are very interesting. Spinetti maintained among other things that:

“This anti-Italian policy found particular application in Dalmatia, especially after the announcement of the marriage between Crown Prince Vittorio Emanuele III and Princess Elena of Montenegro.”

The introduction of the constitutional regime in 1860 led to profound changes in Dalmatia: the freedom of press and association favored the Croatian national movement which had hitherto been held back by the Viennese authorities (although they also were using it against Italian irredentist aspirations, in compliance with the policy of “divide and conquer”). The Austrian electoral laws favored universal suffrage (and therefore favored nationalities with larger numbers), which is why Italians lost political hegemony in Dalmatia between 1860 and 1885: only the city of Zara remained ruled by Italians until the First World War, guided by the Autonomist Party (Partito Autonomista). It was a process parallel to that of other Austrian provinces, such as Carniola and Bohemia, where the Slavs were able to conquer the institutions of provincial autonomy. In Dalmatia, however, this process was even more traumatic for the Italian community, since, unlike the Germans of Bohemia and Carniola, the Italians could not rely on political support from the central government in Vienna. The central government, which had frequently supported Croatian parties in Dalmatia, was ready to make concessions to the Slavs in Dalmatia which they never offered to the Slovenes in Carniola or the Czechs in Bohemia. Therefore middle schools, which depended on the central government (in contrast to elementary schools), were gradually Croatized. The same happened with primary schools in the municipalities governed by the Slavs. The Italian language thus lost its historical status, although it retained its prestige as a “cultural language” (so that even Frano Supilo, one of the leaders of the Croatian national movement, said “Despite being a Croat, I think in Italian”). The size of the Italian community in the coastal cities began to gradually decrease, with the exception of the aforementioned Zara.

The historian Matteo Bartoli, in his book “Le parlate italiane della Venezia Giulia e della Dalmazia”, wrote that:

“After the naval battle of Lissa of 1866, in Dalmatia, just as in Trentino and Julian Venetia, all things Italian were opposed by the Austrians. Unable to Germanize Dalmatia because it was too far away from Austria, the authorities favored the Slavs to the detriment of Italians. In the various Dalmatian cities the administrations gradually passed from Italians to the Croats. In 1861 all of the 84 municipalities of Dalmatia were administered by Italians. In 1875 it so happened that 39 of them now had a Croatian administration, 19 had an Italian administration, and the remaining ones had a mixed Italian-Croatian administration. The municipalities with an Italian administration were: Blatta, Brazza, Cittavecchia di Lesina, Clissa, Comisa, Lissa, Meleda, Mezzo, Milnà, Pago, Ragusa, Sabbioncello, Selve, Slarino, Spalato, Solta, Traù, Verbosa and Zara. In 1873 Sebenico passed to a Croatian administration, in 1882 Spalato also passed to a Croatian administration, followed by Traù in 1886, Arbe in 1904 and Slarino in 1910, leaving only Zara. Also from 1866 to 1914 – with the exception of Zara – Italian schools were closed while Croatian ones were opened. The collapse of the Italian component in Dalmatia is mainly due to this fact, since Italians did not have freedom of cultural expression. The transformation of Italian schools into Croatian schools was accompanied by numerous protests, even in the remote city of Tenin where numerous families demanded they be allowed to retain the Italian language. In Lissa a petition was even brought to the Emperor. Therefore the National League (Lega Nazionale) was founded in the 1890's, and in Dalmatia they had to fund private Italian schools with their own money. The National League had sections in: Cattaro, Ragusa, Curzola, Cittavecchia di Lesina, Spalato, Imoschi, Traù, Sebenico, Scardona, Tenin, Ceraria, Borgo Erizzo, Zara and Arbe, as well as in Veglia, Cherso, Unie and Lussino. All this took place in a climate of continual harassment by the Slavs who had conquered political power. Antonio Baiamonti was the last mayor of Spalato before it fell into the hands of the Croats. He devoted all his life and put all his substances into his city, substances that were never reimbursed by the Austrians despite repeated promises. He died at age 69 in debt up to his neck. He often said: “We Italians of Dalmatia retain a single right: to suffer!”.”

In 1909 the Italian language was prohibited in all public buildings and the Dalmatian Italians were ousted from the municipal administrations. Consequently, by the end of the First World War (1914-1918) the Italian population was almost completely eliminated from Dalmatia, with the exception of some Dalmatian cities and islands.

See also:
The Agony of Italian Dalmatia Under Franz Joseph
The First Dalmatian Exodus, 1870-1880
The Population of Dalmatia in the 12th Century
Quotes on the Italianity of Dalmatia
Quotes on the Italianity of Ragusa

Rampant Croatization

(Written by Liliana Martissa, taken from the association “Coordinamento Adriatico”, 1999)

The cities of the Istrian and Dalmatian coast, which had been inhabited for centuries by a population of Roman origin, who spoke Latin, followed by the local vernacular (Dalmatian, Istriot, Istro-Venetian) and finally Venetian and Italian, are more and more openly being considered historically “Croatian”, while all the artistic manifestations which belong to Latin-Venetian-Italian cultural heritage are being attributed to “Croatian civilization”. This process of Slavicization has accelerated in recent years, perhaps because the Croats were encouraged by the silence and the lack of reaction from the Italian world which has completely abandoned the study and dissemination of the history of Istria and Dalmatia.

Just to give a few examples, let's recall that when the Euphrasian Basilica of Parenzo was proclaimed a world heritage site protected by UNESCO, this same Byzantine-Ravennate style basilica was defined as a “high expression of Croatian art”, when in the period of its construction (6th century) the Croats did not even arrive yet in Parenzo! Let's also remember that for the four hundredth anniversary of his death, the philosopher Francesco Patrizi (Franciscus Patricius) of Cherso, who came from an Italian family of Italian culture, was defined as a “Croat” and renamed “Frane Petric Petrisevic” during an international conference.

A peculiarity of the Southern Slavic peoples unfortunately consists of a type of ethnic nationalism that aims not only at the expulsion (if not annihilation) of the population regarded as being outside its own territory, but also to the destruction of the historical and cultural evidence of its existence. Emblematic, in this sense, in the recent war that bloodied the Balkans, was the burning of the library of Sarajevo, the destruction of the Stari Most bridge, and the destructive rage against churches and mosques, which were considered symbols and testimonies of the enemy's civilization and faith.

As for Istria and Dalmatia, the eradication of memories of the past, conducted by the Slavs, is more subtle: they do not destroy most of the monuments belonging to other peoples civilization, but instead they claim these monuments are “Croatian”.

In the near future there will be two important international events organized by Croatia: the exhibition at the Vatican on “Croats religious faith and culture” that will be inaugurated on October 20, 1999, and the exhibition in Spalato on “Croats and Carolingians”, scheduled for December 2000 as part of the international event whose theme is: “Charlemagne and the birth of Europe” and has as its seat five European cities (the first major exposition has already been prepared in Paderborn, Germany). Regarding the exhibition at the Vatican, we have only journalistic anticipations from which it is possible to conclude that most of the exhibits will be of Dalmatian origin. And as for the exhibition in Spalato, we have the accurate English presentation in which some historical falsifications appear.

Istria is called “Croatian land”, but in fact it can not be defined as such in the Carolingian period (it will only become so in the twentieth century) neither for political affiliation, since it belonged to the Kingdom of Italy under the Holy Roman Empire, nor for ethnic composition, since it was inhabited by a neo-Latin population (descendants of the romanized Histri of Region X of Roman Italy “Venetia et Histria”) that even under Byzantine rule had maintained the laws and customs of its fathers (the Roman municipal system) and for this very reason intolerably opposed the new feudal system introduced by the Franks (as evidenced by the Placitum of Risano in the year 804). Just like Istria, the cities of Zara (which was mentioned several times in the exhibition catalog) and Spalato (seat of the exhibition itself) had nothing to do with the Croats, because they belonged to Byzantine Dalmatia and were inhabited by a people who spoke a neo-Latin Romance language. So then, why is it titled “Croats and Carolingians”? Considering the cultural offensive launched by Croatia in the international arena, we hope that Italian scholars will abandon their attitude of indifference in this regard, and start paying special attention to the above-mentioned events.

Pits of Death Give up Their Grisly Secret

(Written by Andrew Gumbel, taken from the newspaper “The Independent”, London, August 31, 1996)

Andrew Gumbel in Trieste explains why the story of a massacre went untold for 50 years.

History teaches that the perpetrators of war crimes all too often elude capture and get forgotten. But at least the war crimes themselves, especially when they involve the massacre of innocent civilians, are remembered and committed to collective memory. Or are they?

In the past few days, Italy has been making a painful discovery: for the past 50 years it has turned a blind eye to a horrific slaughter of its own citizens at the end of the Second World War.

The victims were Italians living in an area near Trieste, on either side of the much-contested border between Italy and Slovenia. Between 1943 and 1948, several thousand were rounded up - first by Tito's partisans and then, after the war, by the Yugoslav secret police. They were tortured and mutilated in prisons and concentration camps, then thrown into deep limestone pits while they were still alive to suffer a horrifically slow death.

It seems extraordinary that the massacre of the Foibe (the local dialect word for the pits) should simply disappear from the national consciousness. The main reason was the titanic struggle between Fascists and Communists at the end of the war, and the deep polarisations in Italian society this caused.

The Foibe were forgotten because the Italians living in the Trieste area and the Istra peninsula were associated with Mussolini's expansionist ambitions, and thus deemed to be Fascists unworthy of any compassion. Moreover, the Italian partisan movement was dominated by the Communist Party, which at the end of the war was so keen to build bridges with Yugoslavia that it preferred not to ask awkward questions about Tito's own territorial ambitions around Trieste - the driving force behind the massacres in the first place.

Soon, a deliberate policy of collective blindness was in place. In 1946 the Italian Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, visited a notorious prison- house in the Slovene capital, Ljubljana, that was stuffed with Italian civilians. Togliatti saw none of them, because they had been herded into a cellar, allowing him to return to Italy saying, "there are no Italian prisoners in Yugoslavia".

Later, a repatriation scheme allowed left-wing Italians to go home from Yugoslavia through the good offices of the Communist Party, on the tacit understanding that they would keep their mouths shut. Soon the only Italians making a fuss about the Foibe were the neo-Fascists, whose credibility was so tattered nobody took them seriously.

Postwar Italy became so divided that its memories of the war split along ideological lines. There were "left-wing" massacres perpetrated by the Nazis and the Fascists - which became part of the mythology of the new Italian democratic state - and there were "right-wing" massacres such as the Foibe, which sank into popular obloquy.

So things might have remained had it not been for the recent, farcical trial of Erich Priebke, a former SS captain responsible for the most notorious of the "left-wing" massacres, the killing of 335 Jews, resistance fighters and their families in 1944 in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome.

Soon the usual left-right game began. The left wanted to focus on the Ardeatine Caves, while the neo-Fascist right wanted to include the Foibe as well. Then there was a breakthrough. In Trieste, the local secretary of the PDS, successor to the Italian Communist Party, came out with a statement describing the Foibe as one of the great tragedies of the century and urging the left to look critically at its record on the issue.

The PDS has now promised to open its archives on the subject, and a Roman magistrate has begun looking for war criminals who can still be prosecuted.

What is striking is how little is known about the Foibe - even a reliable death toll. Roberto Spazzali, an academic specialist on the subject, says only 600 corpses have been exhumed [editor: as of August 1996]. Considering the number of people who went missing, the true figure is likely to be in the thousands [editor: after more extensive research since the publication of this article 20 years ago, experts place the death toll at between 20,000 and 30,000 Italians].

The truth now emerging is that most of the victims of the Foibe were not Fascists at all - they included a number of pro-left resistance leaders opposed to Tito's expansionism. The bitter irony after all these years is that the Foibe was a tragedy for the Italian left, too.

The History of Pola (Condensed)

Pola, Istria — Old Italian City

Pola was founded in 178-177 BC as a Roman military post. In 46-45 BC it was established as a Roman colony and settled by Italian colonists. The city was destroyed in 43-42 BC, but was later rebuilt by Emperor Augustus and renamed Colonia Pietas Iulia Pola Pollentia Herculanea. In 12 BC the city of Pola, together with the rest of Istria, was included in Regio X Venetia et Histria (the tenth region of Italy). Pola, like all the other Istrian cities, was an integral part of ancient Italy and remained culturally and ethnically Italian for the next 2,000 years.

During the Middle Ages the city of Pola was part of the Kingdom of Italy (476-538), Exarchate of Italy (584-751), Kingdom of Italy (751-952), Patria del Friuli (1077-1148), Republic of Venice (1148-1291), Patria del Friuli (1291-1331) and the Republic of Venice (1331-1797). In the early 19th century Pola was briefly part of the Kingdom of Italy, but fell under Habsburg rule in 1815 and was annexed to the Austrian Empire. After World War I and the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Pola once again returned to the Kingdom of Italy. Pola officially remained under Italian sovereignty until 1947.

After World War II Istria was occupied by the Yugoslav Communists and annexed to Yugoslavia. The native Italians were terrorized, persecuted, murdered and forced to flee in a series of events known as the Foibe Massacres and the Istrian Exodus. Between December 1946 and September 1947, the city of Pola was emptied of nearly its entire population: an estimated 32,000 of 34,000 Italians (94% of the population) were forced to abandon their homes and property in Pola and emigrate to Italy and other countries due to fear of persecution, torture and death under Yugoslav rule. Later, new Slavic immigrants arrived to repopulate the deserted city. Like the rest of Istria, Pola lost its 2,000 year old heritage and cultural identity; the city became croatized and was renamed “Pula”.

In 1991 Yugoslavia broke up and Croatia declared its independence; the city of Pola was then incorporated into the new country of Croatia, where it remains today. The Italian Exiles are still awaiting the return of their homeland of Istria.

Full version:  The History of Pola