Bojan Baskar

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

 

 

Imagining the Balkans in Trieste

 

 

Abstract: Building on analysis of the Triestine variety of Balkanist discourse, this paper proposes a more nuanced approach to the study of Balkanism. The internal diversity of Balkanist discourse is methodologically related to the loci of its production. Trieste is conceived as one such locus which paradoxically shares certain important elements of the Balkanist discourse with some other Balkan urban centers (in particular Belgrade, Sarajevo, Novi Sad and Skopje). Trieste is further conceived as a frontier town (ville-frontière), which is also represented as a southern extreme of the demarcating line between western and eastern Europe. It has also been positioned on the alleged boundary between the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Triestine Balkanism, together with its imagery of the Balkans, developed through the confrontation of Italian and Slovenian (cum Croatian) nationalisms. During the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, this local discourse was revived and further elaborated. The central attention was now paid to tracing the cultural frontier which allegedly ran immediately behind the town, separating the civilized town and its Mediterranean Venetian legacy from the barbarian Slavic Balkans.

Keywords: Balkans, Ex-Yugoslavia, Trieste, Slav and Italian nationalisms, cultural boundaries

 

 

In her seminal book, Maria Todorova (1997: 66) maintained that, ”maybe because of its physical proximity or because it did not become organically afflicted with a mission civilisatrice, Italy on the whole did not develop an abstract and hectoring pose toward the Balkans and never lost sight of their concreteness”. In this appraisal of the Italian perceptions of the Balkans, Todorova adopted a view of the Balkans characteristic of Italian political and cultural centers (Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples). This perspective is reminiscent of the notorious move by Edward Said (1978) who in his approach to orientalism focused on the view of the Orient as it was produced in the leading colonial metropolises.

Assuming the perspective of Italian cultural centers, however, one might easily fail to notice that the north-eastern part of Italy is bordering to the Balkan peninsula and that the notion of the north-east border of Italy had been particularly vaguely conceived throughout the period of the Italian nation-making. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the Italian north-eastern borderland, then part of the Habsburg empire, was increasingly targeted as unredeemed Italian lands by the new Italian nationalism. Ethnically and linguistically ‘alien’ populations (allogeni, allofoni) inhabiting the borderland, the ‘Slavs’ in particular, were deemed non-autochthonous (implying by that that their settlement in the region was a result of the Habsburg anti-Italian policy), yet easily capable of being assimilated to the Italian culture. The ensuing ethno-national strife which culminated for the first time at the turn of the century (then primarily as a sharp interethnic nationalist competition under the imperial umbrella) reached its climax during the fascist period (when the borderland became part of Italy) and its post-World War II developments related to the context of the Italo-Yugoslav demarcation and the emerging Cold War fault-line.[1]

The collision of the Italian and the Slav (i.e., the Slovenian and the Croatian) nationalisms in the borderland region (which at the time stretched also along the East Adriatic coast) naturally fostered the mutual imagination of the figures of the culturally different Other (Barbarian, Alien, Savage, Backward, Inferior, etc.). It comes as no surprise that in the perspective of the Italian nationalism, the figure of the barbarian Slav was epitomized by the Slovenians and the Croats. Among the Slavic peoples, the latter, due to their physical proximity, were the only two who were involved in the violent conflict of the Italian north-eastern borderland.[2] Among the Triestine nationalist intelligentsia, the distinction between the good Slavs (e.g. the Czechs) and the bad Slavs (preferably the Slovenians) used to be made already toward the end of the Habsburg period.[3] Occasionally the Slovenian and the Croatian ‘intimate foe’ could also be related to the balkanist imagery and hence externalized as a ‘Balkan barbarian’. At the same time – especially at the end of the Habsburg period – the Slovenian and the Croatian nationalisms were favorably disposed towards the Balkan unity and largely eager to assume the Balkan identity. In Trieste equating the Slavs with the Balkans became perfectly acceptable for both nationalisms.

 

Why choose Trieste?

 

If viewed in spatial terms, as a geographically embedded discourse on essential, insurmountable cultural difference of the Balkans, balkanism (or balkanist discourse) has its core regions as well as its peripheries. Anthropologists in particular are prone to presume that discourses of cultural difference reveal local variation which results from specific local experiences. They are always related to specific loci where they are produced and exploited as identity definers and redefiners. By the same token, anthropologists believe that the variability is also present at higher levels of integration (regional, national), thus questioning the occidentalist assumption that Said and Todorova maintain, respectively, for Orientalism and Balkanism.[4]

The reason why I chose Triestine variety of Balkanist discourse can therefore be envisaged. Due to its geographical situation in the northern extreme of the Adriatic as well as to historical contingencies, Trieste has for centuries represented a periphery and a borderland of different states, although in certain periods it could simultaneously play a much more important role (especially as the principal free port and emporium town of the Habsburg empire).

Taking a look at the map, one can easily notice that it is precisely in the bay of Trieste that the Adriatic coast turns towards south-east. This bay therefore represents the north-west extremity of the eastern Adriatic coast. If the Balkan peninsula were defined geometrically, Trieste would lie precisely on its north-west limit. Geographers, of course, pay more attention to other factors than geometry. In most geographical definitions of the Balkans, Trieste lies not on the Balkan border but more or less close to it.[5]

Geographers who would extend the north-west corner of the Balkans up to Trieste or even beyond it were extremely rare. Still, there is one famous and at his time quite influential representative of this view, namely the Serb geographer Jovan Cvijić. In 1918, when the first Yugoslavia was coming into being, Cvijić published a book in French entitled The Balkan peninsula: Human Geography (La peninsule balkanique. Géographie humaine). As president of the commission for the territorial questions at the peace conference preparing the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 and influential human geographer, guest lecturer at Sorbonne invited by Paul Vidal de la Blache (George 1991: 47), Cvijić was directly involved in the endeavor of putting Yugoslavia on the map. His voluminous work on the Balkan peninsula was thus to provide a human geographical ground for the new nation-state of the Southern Slavs or Yugoslavs. He insisted that the Dinaric Alps as the Adriatic border of the Balkan peninsula should be followed up to the northwest to their very junction with the Alps. To this effect, he proposed the Soča (Isonzo) river as a boundary line of the peninsula in its northwestern corner (Cvijić 1918: 6-7). As Soča runs into the Adriatic north-west of Trieste, the latter also figured on the map of the Balkans (as well as on the map of the desired Yugoslavia). At the end of the second world war, Marshal Tito’s divisions had roughly the same idea about the whereabouts of the north-west Yugoslav border.

Trieste has long been a frontier town in a region where Romance, Slav and German settlement collided. It has been the frontier town (ville-frontière) rather than the town on the border (ville frontalière), if we apply the distinction made by the Belgian scholar Joël Kottek (2000). According to it the frontier town is essentially a contested place; it is a town with two ore more names; a territory invested with two (or more) dreams; a place possessed by the past and overwhelmed by divided memories. As a frontier town, Trieste falls in the same category of towns as Belfast, Jerusalem and Cluj. It has a complicated history of ethno-nationalist conflict which culminated in the interwar period, during the World War II and in the aftermath of the war.

After 1848, the Italian Triestine cultural nationalism, primarily shared by the liberal-national oriented bourgeoisie, was slowly but steadily transforming into political irredentism. From older local representations of Trieste as a prosperous and cosmopolitan Austrian town where the Italian language (or its local Venetian dialect) and the Italian culture are ‘automatically’ embraced by the most diverse immigrants, a step forward towards claims to union with Italy was made. Yet the assurance of the Triestine Kulturnation of its assimilating power was shattered when the positive trend of assimilation of the Slovenian population was reversed toward the last decades of the nineteenth century. The growing number of self-declared Slovenians in the town at the turn of the century was a cause of alarm for it. It is largely over this period that the topoi and images of the menacing Slavic Other descending from his barren mountains above the town and threatening to submerge the old Venetian, Mediterranean or Italian civilization of the coastal plain, proliferated.

 

The Slavic ‘steppe’

 

In Triestine discourse the habitat of the invading Slav was increasingly represented as a barren landscape, a steppe which was supposed to be the homeland environment of the Slavs somewhere between the Carpathians Mountains and the Black sea, but also coterminous with the present settlement of the Slavic nations. The topos of the steppe homeland and its role in the invention of Eastern Europe was studied by the historian Larry Wolff (1995). In his next book (Wolff 2001), he studied in more detail the role of Venice in inventing Eastern Europe in the eastern Adriatic. In the perspective of the Enlightenment Venetian ‘discovery’ of Dalmatia, the steppe appeared as a homeland of the Morlacchi. With this ethnonym, the Venetians referred to the hinterland population of Dalmatia in general (both Orthodox and Catholic Slavs as well as Vlachs) while the name itself referred more specifically to the transhumant Vlach populations. The Morlacchi were made famous all over Europe thanks to Alberto Fortis, the famed 18^th century Venetian explorer of Dalmatia. In his Travel to Dalmatia (Viaggio in Dalmazia) he wrote also about “the homogeneous Tatar steppe stretching from the Adriatic to Siberia.” The barbarian Morlacchi were in his opinion culturally homogeneous with numerous other peoples inhabiting the space between the Adriatic, the Northern and the Black seas (Fortis 1774; see also Wolff 1995: 318-19; Wolff 2001).

As the steppe is popularly imagined as a homogeneous ecosystem lacking internal diversity, the metaphor of the steppe is particularly appropriate to refer to the construct of the culturally homogeneous world of the Slavs. In Triestine imagination this monotonous and homogeneous steppe starts immediately above Trieste and stretches until Vladivostok. Nowadays one still comes across this topos. It also appears in literature, for example in the novel The phantom of Trieste (La fantasma di Trieste) by Enzo Bettiza. Daniele Solospin, the protagonist of the novel, who during the World War I had been a war prisoner in Russia and eventually joined first the revolutionaries and then the Bolsheviks, narrates: “Here (in Russia – B.B.) I was domesticated in an easy and natural way. The steppe reminded me of Karst grown vaster and more dangerous” (Bettiza 1961: 393).[6] He is also admonished by a Triestine (il signor Ugo): “Don’t trust the s’ciavi,[7] Daniele (…) because there is nothing behind their back except the steppe, servility and insanity” (ibid: 99). The topos may be also evidenced in earlier travel writing by foreign travelers to Trieste. An Englishman named A. A. Paton in his Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic (London, 1862), when describing the Slovenian population above Trieste, wrote that “the dress and the appearance of the people remind one of the vicinity to the lands broad and wide that stretch from the Alps to the Baltic” (Carmichael 1995: 12). A German traveler J. J. Gerning in his Reise durch Östreich und Italien (1802) stressed the contrast between “blue waters and green hills” and “the infertile steppe” where the Slavs lived (Carmichael 1995: 19).

Superposed to the ethnic border of Latin and Slav (and German) settlement was therefore another, much more impactive border. In divisions of Europe into its western and eastern part, Trieste has regularly appeared as a southern terminal point of the dividing line. Over the cold war period it was widely assumed, in public discourses as well as in the academia, that this dividing line was based on the difference of two incompatible political systems and social orders. The role of ethnicity in this divide has been given almost no attention. Thus the virtual coincidence of the dividing lines, such as Trieste–Szczecin, Trieste–Gdansk or Trieste–St. Petersburg, with the western frontier of the Slavic settlement was seldom acknowledged. While the first of these three fault-lines was invented by a powerful politician and baptized ‘the Iron Curtain’, the third one (Sankt Petersburg – Trieste) originated in the scholarship, i.e. with the Cambridge historians of family whose intra-European border of different family patterns somewhat miraculously coincided with the western Slavic border.

Another division into two opposed cultural worlds which traces the boundary through Trieste and all along the eastern Adriatic coast, is the one between the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The Karstic Dinaric mountain range which runs along this coast represented a stark contrast to the Mediterranean world of olive groves, vineyards and small burgs of the Dalmatian riviera. This relief contrast of two ecosystems, one of the most conspicuous in the Mediterranean, has inspired hundreds of travel writers and other observers who have been passionately depicting it, inflating it and above all reproducing topoi related to it.

In this fascination of the eastern Adriatic contrast by foreign visitors there has been an interesting constant. Descriptions have always been ethnicized; the notion of an ethnic frontier has always been superposed upon the contrast of the relief and the cultural landscape. For Trieste, this holds truer than for many other places of the eastern Adriatic. As historian Cathie Carmichael has argued, descriptions of Trieste by travelers from the 18^th and 19^th centuries were “strikingly ethnicized, from both the point of view of the new ethnicity of Trieste (i.e. its multiethnic composition as a consequence of the new prosperity of the port – B.B.) and the contrast between the port and the Slavic hinterland” (Carmichael 1995: 12). To mention but two prominent instances: Stendhal felt in Trieste encircled by the barbarians (“in mezzo ai barbari”); for Chateubriand the last breath of civilization expired on the Triestine coast where barbarism started (Carmichael 1995: 20).

 

Insecurity of Triestine identities

 

Today one could hardly find a Triestine of whatever conviction or belonging claiming that Trieste is a Balkan town. One century earlier, however, Slovenian and Croatian ethnicity viewed their belonging differently. The Croatian intelligentsia of the town published a journal titled Balkan. The Slovenian community, much stronger in number and economic resources, was a proprietor of an imposing building in the close center housing the Slovenian home of culture-cum-hotel. This symbol of Slovenian economic prosperity and cultural self-confidence was also called Balkan.[8]

There are, however, several other reasons why Trieste can be deemed a Balkan town. These are primarily cultural[9] and demographic as a good part of the town’s population originates from the Eastern Adriatic. As one can infer from similar situations, the most ardent Triestine Italian nationalists and irredentists often wore recognizably Slavic names. In the whole of Italy, harboring nostalgia for the Italianness of the eastern Adriatic coast is most intense in Trieste. Triestine nostalgic milieux fully participate in the notorious Balkan game of appropriating prominent historical personalities, accomplishments and cultural features of other peoples. The merchant republic of Dubrovnik, together with its Renaissance and Enlightenment literature and science, has been the bone of contention for Croat and Serb nationalists but it is also being claimed by Italian nationalists from Trieste.

There is another, more important attitude that Trieste shares with other western Balkan towns, namely the contempt for everything rural. This attitude is bound up with characteristic dichotomizing of the rural and the urban, and of the mountains and the plain. In these towns – besides Trieste one should point out in particular Belgrade and Sarajevo but also Novi Sad, Skopje and Zagreb – diverse milieux of intelligentsia (writers, publicists, journalists and artists, but also scholars from diverse disciplines) can be identified who share this contempt of the countryside, the peasants and the highlanders.[10]

The contempt for the ‘violent mountaineers’ was recently reenacted during the wars of Yugoslav succession. At the time there was a lot of talk about the ‘revenge of the countryside’, the ‘urbicide’, the ‘violent Dinaric character’, ‘uncultured highlanders’, etc. Within this discourse – which represents a strong version of the local balkanist discourse – the opposition of the mountains and the plain was often exploited as a central explanatory device of the war and ethnic cleansing related to it.

Taking a look at the actors who were commenting in this vein on the Yugoslav bloody demise, one notices that they often originated from the mentioned Balkan urban centers. Moreover, it is possible to document that to a certain extent a dialogue went on between those milieux, thus adding to this variety of balkanist discourse a certain network quality. As a case in point I will bring forward the famed Triestine journalist and travel writer Paolo Rumiz. In his war-reporting from ex-Yugoslavia and his travel books from the eastern Adriatic he developed an amateur anthropology of violent highlanders driven by the force of geographical determinism to aggress the peaceful and tolerant people of the coast.[11] In his popular anthropology, the highlanders and the people of the plain are two different anthropological types who belong to two essentially opposed cultures. They are destined, sooner or later, to collide in an anthropological conflict. In the same vein, the Balkan separatism is something anthropological; it is an outcome of an anthropological selection (Rumiz 1996).

Rumiz eventually used the same device to explain the Padanian separatism, comparing, for example, Venice and Belluno to Sarajevo, pretending that they were in the same manner surrounded, even besieged by a hostile countryside.[12] Padanian separatists are depicted as highlanders suffering from the same ethnic psychosis as their Balkan counterparts. Interviewing the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, then mayor of Venice, Rumiz fully agreed with him that commandoes who one night climbed the top of the campanile of San Marco and hanged out their separatist standard, originated from a culturally backward environment (Rumiz 1998: 208). This environment, described as ‘sad villages’, a typical ‘rurban’ agglomerate of the subalpine Italy with its small family firms dispersed across the countryside, Rumiz considered a landscape which generated the separatist pathology. He also called it palanka. This term which in its original Ottoman usage denoted a small palisaded town in the Balkan borderland (Ćeman 2005) eventually became a synonym for the village and also for provincialism. In 1969 a book was published in Belgrade titled Filosofija palanke, i.e. Philosophy of the palanka (Konstantinović 1969). The book was much admired by Serbian intellectuals and students of the 1968 generation. In 1991 it had its second edition and in the following years its devotees, then largely present among Belgrade oppositional intellectuals, recognized in the book a prophecy of what was to happen in the 1990s. Recently one devotee claimed that Radomir ”Konstantinović was a prophetic reader of the signs around him in Belgrade in the 1960s” (Bjelić 2002: 12).[13] When Rumiz makes his use of the notion of palanka, his ideas about it are dependent on this cult book since he mentions it himself. He regrets that he discovered it only when the war was over and he boldly states that the book ”not only foresaw everything but it also contains a very useful theoretical model for understanding ethnocentric fanaticisms and pseudomythologies of our parts” (Rumiz 1998: 25). Rumiz, who doesn’t read Serbian, seems here to be reproducing what his Belgrade interlocutors have told him about the book.

In the same vein, Rumiz quoted his interlocutors from Belgrade, Novi Sad, Sarajevo or Zagreb whenever he needed some support for his geographical determinist view of the mountains-versus-the-plain conflict. Triestine Italian, Sarajevan Muslim and Belgrade Serb intellectuals of a certain cosmopolitan bent could thus fully agree that those strangling Sarajevo and other cultured towns from their mountains were actually not ‘the Serbs’ but just violent highlander bumpkins who hated everything urban and down land. The advantage of this rhetoric strategy was that it allowed one to avoid ethnic accusation, but it also helped a certain kind of the Belgrade oppositional intelligentsia to locate the evil in the rural area in order to be capable of believing in its own innocence (Baskar 1999).

Yet the background experience influencing one’s imagination of what does it mean to be an urbanite or a peasant or a violent highlander significantly varies dependent on whether one grew up as a Muslim in Sarajevo, a Serb in Belgrade or an Italian in Trieste. The experience of many Triestine Italians has been the one of the Italian-Slovenian nationalist competition which was, on the Italian side, largely represented as a Slavic threat from the mountains above Trieste. The most important single event was the invasion of Trieste at the end of the World War II by Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav divisions who liberated the town from the Wehrmacht forces. To that approximate half of population who experienced the short rule of Tito’s Partisans as an act of barbarian occupation (“the worst thing which happened to Trieste in its whole history”), this was a highly traumatic event. The memory of it was bizarrely reawakened in 1991, when the Yugoslav military, having agreed to retreat from Slovenia after the so called ten days war, asked the friendly Italian government for permission to retreat through the port of Trieste. The government in Rome, oblivious or perhaps even ignorant of the Triestine aversion to Yugoslav tanks and soldiers, recklessly agreed. This caused such a tremendous uproar in Trieste that the government had immediately to revoke its decision, so that the humiliated Yugoslavs had to move out through the neighboring Slovenian port.

Due to its position on the former Yugoslav border as well as its shared history of the eastern Adriatic, Trieste from the very beginning of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s anxiously followed the events. Much commenting followed the same balkanist lines as those developed in such a fascinating manner by Paolo Rumiz. When the term ethnic cleansing was coined, the Italian exiles from the eastern Adriatic, strongly present in Trieste, immediately proclaimed from the roof-tops that they had actually been the first victims of those same Dinaric ethnic cleansers. (“What they now do to each other, they first did to us”.) The news of Serbian shelling and strangling of Croatian and Bosnian towns reawakened memories of the Yugoslav army’s invasion of their town.

 

Imagining cultural boundaries

 

In the Triestine balkanist discourse of the 1990s the central attention was paid to tracing the cultural frontier which allegedly ran immediately behind the town. The amateur anthropology of Paolo Rumiz reveals a characteristic Triestine obsession with tracing cultural or civilizational frontiers, in particular those of the eastern Adriatic but also others. Let me quote one passage from Rumiz where he describes what is to be found on the other side of the cultural boundary immediately above Trieste (1994: 79-80):

Here the Venetian and Mediterranean influence ends, end the vineyards and hills and intensive culture, end the sandstone and the trigonometry of campanili. End the burgs on the top of the hills, the houses in straight lines like in small towns. There begin dispersed villages, latifundia, pastoral expanses, an arid world, marked by the ferocious defense of the space rather than the cycle of seasons, a world rich with strong myths and collective epos rather than secret magic. And it is also because of the clash of these two cultures that, more to the south, in Bosnia and Dalmatia, the war outbroke.

In these ‘arid pastoral expanses’ one easily recognizes a reformulation of the old topos of the Slavic steppe. The karstic plateau above Trieste was no doubt strikingly barren in the past which is not a case anymore in the time when Europe is complaining of the vegetation increasingly covering the noncultivated lands. From the fourteenth century onwards, the Karst was, the same as Trieste, part of the Habsburg state. When Trieste expanded as a port and emporium, the hinterland became the provisioner of the town.

Let me quote one more passage, this one taken from Guido Miglia, another Triestine journalist and essayist (Miglia 1994: 44):

The drama which is perturbing the Balkans passes once more through Trieste, with even stronger pressure on Istria and Quarnero: the fear, the terror of the civil war which rages between the Croats and the Serbs involves the destiny of a land which is so close to us and which was maturing over centuries between two illustrious civilizations of Europe, the Republic of Venice and the multinational Habsburg empire. For this reason, she grew up pacific and tolerant and had nothing in common with a hatred of race or religion that so often stained the Balkan regions with blood.

Both Miglia and Rumiz subscribe to the notion developed by the local intelligentsia that Trieste is heir to Venice.[14] This upper Adriatic translatio imperii enabled Italian nationalists in Trieste to redefine Triestine culture and identity as Venetian and hence Italian, and also Mediterranean (as opposed to the continental Central European civilization of the Habsburgs). Dependent on the situation, the Habsburg legacy may also be acknowledged and valued (as is the case in the above quoted passage by Miglia). As both civilizational legacies, the Venetian and the Habsburg, are being invoked in support of the claim of the Triestine non-Balkan belonging, the Venetian cultural reference cannot be used as a sole criterion. Neither the equation of the Balkans with the Ottoman legacy is of much help as the westernmost extremity of the Ottoman Empire was about three hundred kilometers away from Trieste. The sole remaining criterion of the Balkanness is the Slavs.

 

 

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Notes

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