A Slave in My Family

 

Creative commons, author unknown

U tom stubu, kaže se, ima velika soba, mračna dvorana u kojoj živi crni Arapin.

In this pillar, it is said, there is a large room, a dark hall in which lives the black Arab.

from 'The Bridge on the Drina' by Ivo Andrić

Nobel Prize for Literature 1961

Ivo Andrić was a Bosnian Serb who wrote his prize-winning novel about the 16th century Turkish Bridge spanning the River Drina at Višegrad. From the moment I read it I needed to know, who was the mysterious Arab that lurked within a stone bridge and what was he doing in Bosnia? 

Amin al-Husseini, an Arab born in Jerusalem, was indicted for war crimes in Bosnia by the post-war Yugoslav government, but it wasn't him. Modern Arabs travel to Bosnia to reach a Muslim haven in the heart of Europe, but it's not them. Ivo Andrić's Black Arab was not even an Arab, he was African.

The knowledge that Africans may have lived in the Balkans snuck into my life the back way and like many alternative routes began with a subjective decision. 

I had my DNA tested. 

What a wealth of suffering that simple sentence has revealed! 

The genetic testing company 23andMe provided my DNA results in Confidence Levels on its Chromosome Painting page. The 50% Confidence Level is termed Speculative. (This is the one you see when you open the email.) At this level I have 0.3% Congolese and SE African genes. On the chromosomes themselves this is demonstrated by a tiny splodge of pink on chromosomes 2 and 3. At 60% Confidence the same splodges change to 0.3% Broadly Sub Saharan African. At 70, 80 and 90% confidence the splodges are still there but now they fall into a group termed ‘unassigned.’

0.3% is about one part in 250 or a 6X great grandparent. My great great grandfather Martin Mikatović was born in Tar in 1822, a village in the region of Istria in modern Croatia. A 2X great grandfather gives me 1/16 of my genes. A 6X great grandfather gives me 1/256 or 0.39%.

But which year is this?

Allowing 20 – 30 years per generation gives us 80 – 120 years before Martin's birth. My African relative, therefore, was most likely born between 1702 and 1742. That is a little over a century after the Mayflower sailed to America and Oliver Cromwell decapitated Charles 1. 

Not that long ago. 

If you were African in the 18th century and your DNA has turned up in a person whose ancestors came from a country within the Turkish Ottoman Empire, then you were a slave. And not a Pliny-the-Younger-type-well-looked-after-slave either. The Arabs sold black and white slaves but the black ones were on the lower rung and, like their brothers in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, frequently died as a result of cruel treatment. 'Some 10,000 slaves, black and white, were brought into the Ottoman Empire every year' and my relative most likely came from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar or Sudan (1). In the mid-18th century, the demand for specifically black African slaves increased. (4)

The famous Turkish cotton industry required African slaves, and their descendants live in Turkey to this day. There they 'are often called “Arabs”... they also refer to themselves as Arabs...[and] this has led to a situation in which “Arab” means “black.” (1) 

It is significant then that a little less than one eighth of my family came from Montenegro, a country that had belonged to the Ottoman Empire for most of the 1500’s and 1600’s and was semi-autonomous until its liberation in 1878. In addition, I have the same amount of Greek Anatolian genes as I do African. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire and it is an easy leap to say that in those days a country like Bosnia, that was also incorporated within the Ottoman's vast domain, might have seen African slaves, although it wouldn’t have been the peasants who owned them. The Ottoman Empire collapsed a few years after World War 1, having expanded, declined and fragmented over its 600-year history and made very few friends in Europe during that time.

The history of humanity is the history of slavery, and I use a literary device when I say that ‘for over a millennium’ there was a thriving Arab slave trade in the East that sold men, women and children to the Ottomans and any others with the money to pay, including Europeans. This reign of misery was certainly longer than a thousand years and it is probably not known exactly when the Arab slave trade started although most sources link it with the rapid spread of Islam from the seventh century. In a true human spirit of self-justification, arguments rage on the internet about which slavery was worse, European or Arab. No question here. All slavery is an obscenity or, in the words of the great Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, ‘I don’t buy and sell human beings.’

Novigrad 2018 M Walker

 

‘See that wall? That’s to keep the Turks out.’ 

So said Silvana, my birth mother, pointing at my photograph of the 6m high Venetian wall in the port of Novigrad in Istria. 

She was born in nearby Tar in 1920, two years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, near enough historically to grow up with stories of marauding Turkish pirates. ‘Slaves [were] brought by pirates’ (3). Silvana called them Turks but history calls them the Barbary Pirates and they worked for the Ottomans around the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. 

Silvana's family name, Mikatović, means the son of Saint Michael and is derived from the Greek for the Archangel Michael, Michali Taxiarhis, or Michael the Brigadier. The earliest reference to the name Mikatović I have been able to find was about 1720 in the Poreč area near Tar but there may easily be earlier ones. The church books from the seventeenth century that are displayed on FamilySearch.com are written with thick quills and ink in abbreviated Latin and, if I am in the wrong mood, scrolling through a hundred pages defeats me. 

I ought to try harder.

Politicians like Mussolini who tried to divide these old regions into modern political entities and to impose a single national language on them forgot that the residents had long memories. Greek, Turkish, Slavic, Austrian and Italian eras intermingle and are remembered in place names, family names and local dialects. As Silvana said to me, 'you only speak the same because you have television and radio. We didn't have any of that.' 

A case could easily be mounted that my African relative was a woman. More women were deprived of their freedom in the East than men whereas the reverse was true in the West (2). Perhaps she was a beautiful black concubine in an Istanbul harem or a nursemaid to a wealthy Turk. Perhaps she was a spinster, endlessly spinning cotton thread to weave the sails of the Ottoman fleet.

Although I am adopted, I have a lot of information about my birth family which helps makes sense of my genes but, having said that, a chronological issue remains. The academic papers relating to the settlement of Tar, my family’s village, state that the area was settled from Venice’s possessions in the south in the late 1500’s and 1600's, not the early 1700's when my African relative was born. These emigrants were mostly Slavs but not always. A whole range of ethnic groups from the south needed to escape from the marauding Turks at this time and Venice wanted to repopulate Istria which had been ravaged by the plague. 

How do I feel about all this?

I am inspired to compose the Romantic Version. That's how I feel.  

Around the year 1700 a baby girl called Mercy was born to a couple in Kenya. The baby was black and very beautiful and, as she grew towards young womanhood, she attracted attention wherever she went.

Mercy's village was close to the Indian Ocean and one tragic day when she was only twelve she was playing on the beach with other children when she caught the attention of a pirate ship. They captured Mercy, placed her aboard their reeking vessel and sailed her first to an Arab slave market in Aden, Yemen. From here she was transported to Cairo in Egypt in the belief that as a concubine she would fetch a high price. 

However, the ill treatment and privations of the voyage took a heavy toll on her beauty, and she was purchased instead by a Turkish cotton grower. He set her to work in his fields near the Anatolian coast irrigating the cotton in the hot summer months and harvesting the fluffy pods as they matured in the late autumn.

Separated from everything she loved, Mercy began to die of grief.

One day, the cotton grower looked at the beautiful girl properly for the first time and, moved by a strange compassion, asked her why she looked so sad. Mercy could not speak his language and was unable to reply but, seeing that she had dexterous hands and fine fingers, the cotton grower removed her from the harsh fields and brought her into the long rooms where dozens of women sat all day spinning thread on drop spindles.

Their kindness and affection nursed Mercy's wounded spirit and she did not die, yet death remained present in her eyes for she could see no other way to be restored to her family and her culture. She often dreamed that she would die, in the same way that other people look forward to a joyful event.

After several years, the owner's son chanced to visit the spinning rooms bringing with him his Greek friend Dimitri. At this time Turkey was a multi-ethnic country and many Greeks lived there. Dimitri saw the beautiful girl spinning her everlasting cotton thread. Mercy lifted her head and their eyes met.

Dimitri was smitten and that night he could not sleep. His heart pleaded for the opportunity to look upon Mercy a second time. His soul begged him to free her. 

But haggling over a price with the cotton grower was no easy matter and Dimitri, being a Christian in a Muslim state, did not have much money. However, that night the cotton grower had a dream in which he saw Dimitri and Mercy standing together with an angel by their side. He placed great store by dreams and was persuaded to agree on a lower price that was within Dimitri's limited means.

By now Mercy was sixteen, the age at which most girls married. When Dimitri explained that he wished to marry a black girl who had been a slave on a cotton farm, Dimitri's father was too shocked to reply. Dimitri remained defiant and, as he was over twenty-one, little could be done to stop the marriage. Nor would Dimitri lose his inheritance because Greeks who had not 'turned Turk', as converting to Islam was then called, were very poor.

In desperation, Dimitri's father paid a visit to the Turkish cotton grower who, realizing that he'd been manipulated out of a valuable slave by his own wayward emotions, was furious. He chased Dimitri and Mercy across the sea to the powerful city-state of Dubrovnik. He should have known better because not only were the magistrates of Dubrovnik rich they were also men-of-the-world and had managed alone out of all the countries in the Balkans to successfully bargain with the Ottomans to retain their independence. They simply stone-walled the unfortunate cotton-grower who left for his farm in a high temper vowing never to pay attention to his dreams again.

However, the Great Earthquake of 1667 had flattened the noble streets of Dubrovnik taking much of its fine architecture with it and, in the year of Mercy's birth, the city's magistrates had granted to the Ottomans a piece of coastal land only twenty kilometres to the north. By this means the Empire of Venice, that had for a long time looked on Dubrovnik with greedy eyes, would be forced to defeat the Ottomans before attempting to take it over in its weakened state. This was a very astute move by the magistrates, effectively guarding their city as it was being rebuilt, while simultaneously placating the Turks and frustrating the Venetians. Today the land still belongs to Bosnia. 

And so, amidst the scaffolding, Dimitri and Mercy were married, but they did not feel safe in Dubrovnik with the Ottomans a mere twenty kilometres away. They decided to migrate further north to the Istrian peninsula. This was an area of great ethnic diversity and considerable Greek influence. Here Dimitri met the influential Mikatović family who over a century before had travelled north from Montenegro, another country with a strong Greek background. He noticed immediately that they had a Greek/Slavic name. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and intermarriage between two families.

Sources and extra resources 

(1)    Turks with African ancestors want their existence to be felt (archive.org)

(2)   The Arab slave trade (ourhistory.org.uk)

(3)    Memory of Vanished African Community Lingers in Montenegrin Town | Balkan Insight

(4)    Only Memories and Emptiness Remain: The History of Ulcinj’s Afro-Albanian Community in Montenegro - Lefteast

(5)    The story of the black African families who lived in Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Face2Face Africa

(6)   39321 LES CIUTATS MEDITERRANIES.indb (iec.cat)

VINČA, Serbia - Europe's First Civilization

 

Link to my prehistory blog.

VINČA, Serbia - Europe's First Civilization (myprehistory.blogspot.com)

The Anguish of the Jews -- book review and reflections

23 CENTURIES OF ANTISEMITISM

If I said that this work was a resource to every expression of antisemitism in history, I would not be far from the truth. Its research is exhaustive and gives some understanding of why antisemitism seems to be the default setting of every age. I have added it to my blog War in the Balkans because of the Holocaust of the Jews in Croatia and Serbia during World War 2, and I will ask the question: to what extent can antisemitism be held accountable for the world’s response to the present Israeli Hamas conflict?

Edward Flannery was an American Catholic priest who published the work in 1965. On the subject of antisemitism, he doesn’t mince words. ‘The vast majority of Christians…are all but totally ignorant of…the immense suffering of Jews throughout the Christian era... because the antisemitic record does not appear in history books.’

I am a Christian and it grieves me to read that antisemitism, although present in ancient Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt (Maccabees 1 and 2), was cemented throughout the fourth century of the Christian era and into the early fifth century. It stemmed from ‘the full flowering of that theology which laid Jewish miseries to divine punishment to Christ’s crucifixion’. Neglecting St Paul’s exposition on God’s election and salvation of Israel in Romans 9 -11, the church fathers ‘turned upon the synagogue with the greatest vigour’. Indeed, the language of St John Chrysostom against the Jews reminds one of Hitler. Only St Augustine was faithful to St Paul. ‘Christians,’ he wrote, ‘have a duty to love Jews and to lead them to Christ,’ but ‘he is at the same time at a loss to understand their unbelief, this animosity towards Christians, and their unending misfortunes.’

During this same century, the centre of the Talmud was established in Babylonia and ‘It was forgotten or ignored that the Jewish dispersion began many centuries before Christ and that Palestine was never completely emptied of Jews.’

At this time, violence was perpetrated by both sides and some countries showed less tolerance than others. In Rome Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) respected the legal rights of Jews and ‘the Pauline teaching of special affection for Israel’. Under the Emperor Justinian (483-565), however, who reigned from Constantinople, rules restricting Jewish life were passed with liberality: what Jews could own, where they could be seen, the professions from which they were barred, where synagogues could be open or closed and where Judaism was outlawed.

From 1096, matters deteriorated in Germany, France, Austria and England, as the first Crusaders, eager to free the Holy Land from the Muslims, turned first upon European Jews. In what the author refers to as the ‘the superstitious zealotry of the mob’, Jews were offered baptism or death, and thus many were slaughtered. ‘From January to July of 1096 it is estimated that up to 10,000 died, probably one fourth to one third of the Jewish population of Germany and Northern France at that time.’ Once the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, the slaughter continued. ‘In 1099 at journey’s end in Jerusalem the soldiers of Godfrey de Bouillon found the Jews assembled in a synagogue and set it ablaze.’

With the onslaught of the Second Crusade in 1147, St Bernard was forced to condemn further antisemitism in Europe by again recalling St Paul. “Who is this man that he should make out [St Paul] to be a liar and render void the treasure of Christ’s love and pity?” In 1272 following incidences in the Rhineland and Bavaria, Pope Gregory X forbade forced baptisms and violence. Many Jews migrated to Palestine and, of those who remained, 100,000 throughout Germany and Austria were killed by mobs stirred up by noblemen.

The development of the Jews as usurers and money lenders was an outcome of the laws restricting their lives, and brought its own resentment from Christians. ‘By the end of the thirteenth century, Jews were expelled from France, England and most of Germany. In almost all cases, the expulsions found the origin in the business of usury.’ Yet the list of things they were accused of is a tribute to the Mediaeval imagination and the zealous peasant jumped at any excuse for murder and for the widespread burning of the Talmud. Jews were even blamed for the Black Death (1347-50). ‘Apparently, no enormity was too great to lay at the door of the Jews.’ In a chilling foretaste of the twentieth century, ‘the massacres were greatest in Germany’ and ‘by the end of the fifteenth century no more than three or four German cities still harboured a Jewish population… Most left Germany for Poland or Lithuania.’ Upon their failure to accept his teaching, Martin Luther also turned his fury against the Jews the following century.

Popes and Christian leaders condemned the atrocities. In 1418 Martin V ‘issued a decree which guaranteed protection [for the Jews] of their lives, rites, privileges and festivals [and] forbade forced baptism.’ St Bernadinus of Sienna (1380-1444) wrote, “As to the Jews, I say here what I say elsewhere: no one who has concern for his soul can injure the Jews, whether it be their persons or their faculties, or in any other way, for even to Jews, Christian piety and love must be shown since they possess a human nature.”

Only in Rome were the Jews never persecuted from the fall of the Western Empire until the close of the sixteenth century. ‘Jewish-Christian relations were intimate’ even to permitting intermarriage. Northern Italy had ample wealth and plenty of Christian usurers without them and they mostly benefitted from the friendliness of the Popes.

Until the end of the fourteenth century Jews also flourished in Spain, when the power and wealth attained by a few and their relationships with the royal family eventually provoked a downward spiral of resentment and persecution. 50,000 perished in a single massacre and worse was to come. In the wake of the Reconquista came an intense desire to strengthen the Christian state, and a conversion campaign was aimed at the Jews. Antisemitism against both Jews and converted Jews increased over the course of the fifteenth century and contained a strong racist element. However, the biggest problem was the ‘compromisers’, those Jews who by nominally accepting Christianity grew to power and wealth by having, as it is said, a foot in both camps.

Enter the Spanish Inquisition.

‘In 1479…Ferdinand and Isabella untied the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon’ and in 1483 the ‘fanatical Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor General.’ He was the most brutal and the most feared inquisitor and his job was to ‘ferret out’ Jews. Beginning with the dodgy converts, he continued to all the other Jews in Spain. ‘In 1492 the monarchs issued the fatal decree. All Jews must leave the realm by July 30th under penalty of death’. 300,00 departed.

Writing in the twelfth century, Peter Abelard nevertheless sums up the entire Middle Ages. ‘To believe that the fortitude of the Jews in suffering would be unrewarded was to declare that God was cruel. No nation has ever suffered so much for God.’

The Age of the Jewish Ghetto in Europe commenced in the seventeenth century and many Jews moved east to Palestine, the Balkans, Turkey or Poland where life was safer. However, a series of attacks upon Polish Jews by Russians, Cossaks and Swedes during one decade in the second half of the seventeenth century killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Jews and destroyed 700 Jewish communities. ‘With the exception of the Nazi period…the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries constituted the [lowest point] of post-Biblical Jewish history.’

In France, the Enlightenment and the change in ideas swept in by the French Revolution brought some measure of emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century, but the racist antisemitism present in Prussia is considered to be the beginnings of Nazi antisemitism. (Note the difference between religious antisemitism and racist antisemitism.) ‘From this point Germany became the undisputed cultural centre of antisemitism and the source of an endless stream of antisemitic books and pamphlets.’ The German-born Karl Marx is an example of a Jewish antisemite.

As religious faith [in Europe] declined… and the spirit of rationalism and scepticism rose, the need to justify the segregation [of the Jews] in purely secular terms grew…If the plight of the Jews did not stem from the crucifixion, it came from themselves, their ethnic make up; Jews, in a word, were innately perverse.’

Here begins a section marked ‘rationalistic antisemitism’ in which the French writer Voltaire stresses the rationalist grounds of his ‘utter contempt’ for the Jews and Judaism. ‘Jews are… “the most imbecile people on the face of the earth, enemies of mankind, a people most obtuse, cruel and absurd, whose history is disgusting and abominable.”’ His ideas were echoed by the German philosophers Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schleiermacher and Harnack, and studied later by Hitler.

Under the final two Czars, government-approved pogroms against Russian Jews shocked the world and led to the immigration of over a million. Not content with this, Russia published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of badly-written nonsense blaming the Jews for every crime in the universe. Nevertheless, it was well-received and translated into the major European languages and Arabic. ‘When otherwise brilliant minds are so deceived and…even after irrefragable disproof, persist in believing, we are at grips with a collective psychosis, with a will to hate and destroy well beyond the pale of human rationality…a secularized diabolism.’

Thus ended the nineteenth century and we all know what happened in the twentieth.

 

A REFLECTION ON THE OCTOBER 7th ATTACKS ON ISRAEL AND THE PRESENT CONFLICT IN GAZA

In the middle of January 2024, I witnessed Marxist groups outside Newtown railway station in Sydney ardently collecting pro-Palestinian signatures. As there has always a Jewish presence in Palestine, why not collect pro-Israeli signatures, I wondered. It is antisemitism that governs the choice. Why do the Federal Greens refuse to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7th? Why is the NSW Teachers Federation openly pro-Palestinian? Why does Sydney’s art and literary scene consider it appropriate to simplify the present complex situation in Palestine to Israeli attacks on Gazan children? Why are the two sides unequally reported in the media?

Because ‘hatred of Jews [is] a serious social and ethical problem,’ concludes Edward Flannery, and the Australians referred to above are following the tradition of mob mentality outlined in his book. History has established a culture in which it is acceptable to disbelieve Jews.

As an example, regarding the brutal Hamas rapes of Israeli women on October 7th 2023, ‘bone-chilling horrors – such as repeated gang rapes that were so brutal they left women and girls with broken pelvises and mutilated genitals’, I quote from Human rights groups’ hypocrisy on Hamas rape - opinion - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com) 25th December 2023.

‘Amnesty International so far has issued 29 press releases entirely or mostly about Gaza since October 7. They, too, have been filled with baseless allegations about Israeli murders, “apartheid,” and the like. To this day, Amnesty still has not issued any statement about the Hamas rapes.’

And another article from Microsoft Why are feminists silent on Hamas's use of rape as a weapon of war? (msn.com) 20th January 2024.

‘The denial of widespread, preplanned mass rape and sexual violence on October 7 must therefore be treated with the same revulsion as Holocaust denial. Hamas has denied that the rapes occurred, despite overwhelming evidence. Speak up, an Egypt-based feminist initiative, inconceivably has launched a campaign to discredit Israeli victims, with coalition groups joining across the Middle East and a letter condemning The New York Times investigation into sexual violence by Hamas. Speak up boasts over 68,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and 250,000 Facebook members. Turkish public broadcasting has published an article claiming to debunk “outlandish Israeli claims of rape.” Unbelievably, their efforts have found sympathetic ears in Western academia…Ingrained antisemitism on the extreme Left leads to this moral failure.’

How else can we explain it?

Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. ‘He and the Israeli leaders Peres and Rabin received the Peace Prize for having opted for the olive branch by signing the so-called Oslo Accords in Washington. The agreement was aimed at reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.’ Yasser Arafat – Facts - NobelPrize.org

How quickly we forget.

The Invasion of Yugoslavia 1941 - THROUGH FORESTS AND MOUNTAINS, Chapter One

 

https://www.mwalkeristra.com

                                                             
At the hour of national crisis he was brought down like a bull by a terrier, and his memories returned to him only slowly, the good and the bad, but mostly the bad. There was shouting in which he had joined, then a weakness outside his experience and the confusion of not understanding why the slipway was rising to meet him. As is usual with accidents that occur in public places, there was also a crowd that gathered from nowhere to watch in horrified silence. He remembered the woman who stepped from it to bully him kindly, ‘Put your head between your knees, Captain, before you knock yourself out,’ and he remembered his reply, ‘I’m not going to faint,’ just before he did.

So he couldn’t recall Miloš Lompar, aged seventeen and frantic with remorse, attempting to staunch his desperately bleeding shoulder with a rag stained with lubricating oil, nor Commander Filip Kolarov (whom everyone expected to be the hero) recruiting five sailors to transport him from beneath the blood-stained propellers of the torpedo boat and into the waiting ambulance without dropping him. Upon his arrival at the hospital, the rural surgical ward, which dealt mostly with tonsils, appendixes and adenoids, at once increased in self-importance thanks to all the excitement, and he was hurried inside with as little delay as a starting pistol. From a morning that had threatened mundane routine, his shattered shoulder had given the ward meaning and purpose and, by the time of the afternoon ward-round, it was all back together again and reposing below its soft white pillow as contentedly as if it belonged to the hospital and not to him.

This general sense of achievement originated in a surgeon, white-coated and elegantly balding, surrounded by a retinue of medical students who beamed in unison every time he opened his mouth. Arranged around them stood a scrub nurse and a ward sister who looked like she had ironed her scowl on that morning. Before their eyes, Dr Rastoder had performed veritable miracles of surgery, keenly assisted by at least two of those present – possibly more – and had only had to consult the textbook once.

'Awake at last!' he chirped. He smiled. His audience smiled. 'Eighty stitches! - and that's not counting the two severed tendons I repaired, some puréed muscle and a skin graft. You have a great deal to be thankful for, Captain Marković. You’re lucky you didn't lose your arm. Damned lucky!’ he stressed with a very personal determination.

Marković sensed a conspiracy and, in confirmation, one of the students twirled his moustache.

'How long...?' he began.

He pushed himself into a sitting position with his left hand and was at once overcome by a wave of dizziness. On a wheeled table to one side he saw the hazy remains of a blood transfusion, a throbbing jug, the ghost of his dead mother, and a glass that replenished itself with water. At the very end in proud isolation a urine bottle grinned at him, half-full.

'You've been unconscious for five hours,' returned the doctor. Acknowledging the urine bottle, he added, 'More or less.’

Marković grimaced. His mother eased him back onto his pillow then floated away, and the mountain of snowy bandages on his right side settled comfortably down beside him. He watched the crowd observe it with pride.

‘Wiggle your fingers,’ ordered the angry ward sister.

He wiggled his fingers and a shudder ran through the shoulder.

The scrub nurse glanced apprehensively at the surgeon.

‘Perfectly normal,’ he purred. ‘Touch your toes.’

The medical students tittered.

‘Just my little joke.’

‘Can I go home?’ asked Marković. As they seemed so cheerful, he allowed himself hope. ‘I need to get back to the apprentices.’

‘Those two who landed you in here?’ Dr Rastoder inverted his eyebrows and proceeded in a voice of doom. ‘There are more immediate things that you need to know. An infection from any wound that extensive is inescapable. We expect one quite soon, don’t we, sister?’

The ward sister nodded grimly.

‘You’re not serious?’ exclaimed Marković.

‘I’m afraid I am, Captain.’

‘But I’ve heard about trials of…’

‘Penicillin? Rumours, at this point. Your one stroke of luck is that Yugoslavia’s not at war with Germany yet. In that case there would be the possibility of catching an infection from someone fresh from the battlefield.’

Marković levered himself up cautiously. He stopped. He checked both sides. Reaching one arm beneath the injured shoulder, he hauled it up beside the other one and searched around for the exit.

The surgeon cut him off shrewdly.

‘Don’t even think about it.’

'I can’t stay here.'

'You're no good to anyone dead.'

‘It’s only a shoulder!’

‘You wait,’ declared the surgeon.

‘Next patient,’ said the sister.

The team moved on, and the medical students beamed back like a round of applause.

The frustration of his predicament and the pain made him grumpy, of course, and, by the close of that first day, as dinner was served with regimental efficiency from the other end of the long ward, there was no one in it who wasn’t heartily sick of his clenched teeth and thunderous face. When, at lights out, the same sister who had stood by his bed during the ward-round pinned on her veil like a helmet and marched towards him with his night's morphine flashing from her syringe, he glared at her with such indignation that she declared in a tight-lipped tirade that she'd met a lot of patients like him. Oh yes, she had.

‘Take a good look around you, Captain. The worst tonsils, appendixes and adenoids of my acquaintance are models of virtue compared with you – God give me strength! And you needn't think you can expect pain relief to order later on when you can’t sleep, so you’ll have the injection when I tell you and do something about your manners while you’re at it.’

As bad luck would have it, the instant he had accepted the shot and she was massaging it in, he fell asleep in full view of the whole ward, and everyone said they hoped he stayed that way.

The next day was visiting day. Its hours were from two o’clock until five on Wednesdays and Sundays. No illicit visiting was permitted except when compassionate grounds intruded upon the mental health of the ward sister to whom the disruption of her routine occasioned great anxiety. Before the double doors could be flung open to gift-bearing relatives the beds must be made to perfection, the floor must be swept clean of every cowering microbe and the surgeon must complete his rounds. Pills, elixirs, injections, and enemas must be distributed and their associated smells dispersed through the open windows.

At the very end of the day’s queue, as if the act of waiting might atone for their guilt, slunk two gangly boys. Accompanying them was a commander with a sharp eye and a resolute bearing that invited trust. Indeed, a head or two had already turned at the click of his boots on the floor, though he had cloaked his agreeable features with a severity appropriate to the occasion. Marković could see that he regretted doing it, but the boys were completely fooled. They had been very careful to dress in full uniform, to comb their hair and shine their boots, but the perfect presentation could not obscure the terror on their faces nor their quaking knees.

As the trio approached the bed, the officer came to a halt, removed his hat and placed it beneath his arm.

'Lompar!' he commanded.

At once one of the boys handed forward a small bunch of flowers, relieved of half its petals by his quivering hands. At the sight of his commanding officer sprawled down the bed undressed and unshaven, he mumbled an apology only distinguishable as such by the flush of shame that preceded it.

'Ilić!'

The second youth now produced a package of waxed brown paper that he unwrapped to reveal a small nut cake. He saluted feebly and stammered as he stepped back, 'Miloš and I are very sorry, sir.'

Marković smiled wanly and acknowledged them without criticism, for he could see how miserable they were, and he was only grumpy.

The commander waved the youths away.

'All right, dismissed!'

The boys fled. At once the atmosphere lightened and the officer sprung upon the crisp white sheets and positioned himself comfortably on the bed, flipping up the back of his jacket where it subsided too far into the springs.

‘I knew you’d want to see them, Anton,’ he began - bounce, bounce.

‘Oh, don’t sit on the bed, Filip, for God’s sake!’

‘Why?’ Now that he didn’t have to put on an act, he slung one leg across the other, and the bed chortled a little creak in response.

‘Because that old nursing sister will kill me. You’re not allowed to sit on her beds.’

‘Really?’ Filip released his long limbs and extracted a chair from beside the bed of the elderly man next to him. ‘May I?’ he enquired, engaging the fellow in such a charming smile that the man looked suddenly shy, as if few people had ever taken the time to acknowledge him. ‘Thank you.’

He settled himself comfortably on the chair and tapped a rhythm upon his hat.

‘Which old nursing sister? They all looked nice to me.’

‘Boadicea. The one wearing the armour. She hates me.’

‘Nonsense.’ He flourished a cavalier hand into the depths of a canvas satchel and announced, ‘Housekeeping!’

‘What a pleasant fellow you are!’ grumbled Marković.

‘I am on your side, Anton,’ returned Filip genially. ‘Even if you have already made an enemy, though, personally, I doubt it. Now, the Chief, out of the generosity of his heart, has packed you two shirts, your most threadbare trousers he could find – he believes old clothes are suitable for convalescence - your toothbrush, some odds and ends, and a razor to cut the cake.'

‘To shave.’

‘To cut the cake. Poor Petar’s mother insisted he bring it. You won’t be able to use the razor to shave, so beguile one of those nice nurses to do the honours. Girls love that sort of thing. Makes them feel like mothers. Let them bring out your legendary charm.'

'What legendary charm?'

‘Intimacy, Anton, that female equator you haven’t crossed yet. Now observe! You need a shave and that was a good looking nurse who just slipped behind those curtains across the aisle. She’d be an ace with a razor, I bet.’

‘I can shave myself.’

‘Then here’s a shirt. Get her to help you dress.’

‘Can you leave if you’re going to provoke me, please?’ said Anton, attempting to make himself comfortable with his single arm.

Filip grinned at him, poised like a barge pole above the mattress.

‘It’s true, then, what they say about hospital beds being the delusion of a Spartan mindset?’ he asked.

‘My shoulder hurts,’ said Anton in reply.

‘It’s your own fault.’

‘It was not my fault.’

‘It wasn’t your boat.’

‘In that particular case, Filip, it didn’t need to be.’

‘You still haven’t told me what you think of the bed.’

It did no good arguing with Commander Kolarov. While he breathed he would pursue his theme of sympathy being detrimental to recovery and the ward, which had tensed for a clash of opinions, settled back down, pleased that no one had ruffled its professional façade by arguing about whether sympathy might be helpful or not.

‘The wonder is,’ conceded Anton at length, ‘that you're expected to get better sleeping in one.'

This answer relieved Filip of a social burden, and even the elderly man in the next bed expressed his mottled pleasure with lips crinkled by the absence of teeth. But Anton was disappointed because he would have liked some sympathy from Filip and it looked like he wasn’t going to get any. He lay on his bed between the convivial commander and the sensitive old man and thought about the pleasure of his own company, as he often did.

He had regular features similar to the vast majority of his compatriots who agreed, to a man, that he looked good in the right light and the right mood, but could appear fractious when the sun disappeared behind a cloud. Anton said his feelings were none of their business, and this was generally true except for the present circumstances. Yet he had made no attempt to adjust to the hospital, claiming in his defense that he didn’t care what people thought of him. By contrast with the two rows of men and boys all washed, dried and thoroughly institutionalized, he stood out by his refusal to acquiesce peacefully, which no amount of soap and water could remedy.

From behind the curtains floated a faecal odour. The pretty nurse withdrew with a bedpan and hurried from the ward. Filip frowned.

'I hate to see you like this, Anton. Smile. Be grateful. Tell them a joke. You can look like the grim reaper but, if you make them laugh, they’ll love you.’

‘I would appreciate some sympathy, Filip.’

‘You won all hearts yesterday when you fainted on the slipway.’

‘Go to hell.’

Kolarov laughed.

‘Not today, my friend. Got the incident report to write.’ He pulled out a pencil and paper from the same modest satchel, crossed his legs and began scribbling. ‘What happened?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then you’d better think of something quickly for the sake of bureaucracy. I put the boys through this this morning.’

'You weren't too hard on them, I hope?'

'Me?’ replied Filip, his head still sunk in the paper.

‘I thought they looked pretty scared.’

‘Well, one look at you would be enough to scare anyone.’ He tapped the pencil on his teeth and continued writing. ‘If you must know, there were safety procedures that everyone overlooked, including you.’ The commander was not given to reprimand, but the blistering white bandages reflected the sun into his eyes and circumstances wrung it from him. He paused in his writing and placed his hands open in front of him. ‘What were you even doing there, Anton?'

'The boys were curious.'

‘Petar, who hadn’t removed the fuse before you started lecturing him on engines and Miloš, who insisted afterwards that he heard you shout “turn it off”?'

‘Well, why did he start it in the first place?’

'Because he’s seventeen and he’s wondering to himself what might happen if he flicks that switch. That’s what seventeen year old boys do. You shouldn’t have left him and gone off with Petar to explain how propellers work. Miloš panicked when your sleeve got caught, Petar said that he forgot about the fuse, and so did you.’ Kolarov shook his head, most particularly at Anton. ‘Disregard for protocol, Anton. This is when these things happen. Now that we've lost a man we can't afford to lose, I realize the advice is a bit long in the tooth, but you always have to learn the hard way.’

‘You really think I’m that bad?’ Anton muttered.

‘You know I don’t,’ replied Filip, 'You’re one of the most capable men I’ve got but, right now, you look like a bear with a sore tooth and I’m sorry about the boys, but you picked a bad time to be their friend instead of their leader.’

‘Why? You’ve had some more news from Belgrade? '

Filip tossed aside his pencil and drew his brows together.

'Well, you heard about the prince, that he capitulated to Hitler?'

'Yes. And?'

'And the alliance with Germany has not gone down well in the capital. Prince Paul’s gone. General Simović saw to that and now they’re ranging the streets singing “better war than the pact.” The fellow on the wireless said he’d never seen such jubilation.’

‘We’re at war?'

'Not yet, but the staff at the German and British embassies have left Belgrade, so it’s coming. Hitler knows the strategic value of the country and after the capitulation of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary he expected us to agree easily. Our show of defiance will have let that famous rage of his off its leash.'

'But are we ready?'

‘No, we’re not ready! We’ve been treading on egg shells to keep their eyes off us. Now the Nazis will wipe Yugoslavia from the map.'

He spoke calmly but the underlying tension in his voice conveyed its own urgency and through the window to the west the grey limestone peaks trembled at his words from the water to the sky. What a desperate place was a hospital when the enemy would come over the mountains.

Anton pushed himself up until their eyes were level.

'Listen, Filip, I’ve got to get out of here.'

But Filip only rose and replaced his hat.

‘The minute I hear anything further, I'll tell you.' He patted the bed affectionately. 'You just sit tight and get better.'

He headed towards the exit. On his way out he met the pretty nurse who was struggling to load the cleansed bedpan into the top level of a cupboard. With a gracious smile, he took it from her, slipping it in easily and, out of the corner of one eye, Anton caught him wink at her.

****

By the third day, he was managing a rumble around the ward without dizziness, to the distress of the other patients who wished he'd push his throttle in and not appear so menacing: one hundred and ninety centimetres of bone and muscle, as dense and dark as the trunk of a black poplar and just as communicative. Since regaining consciousness, he’d scarcely exchanged two words with anyone except the old man beside him whom he’d found hiding beneath the bedclothes in anticipation of a visit from his wife.

However, early on his fourth morning, while watching out the window for Germans, his wolf-like reflection in the glass so alarmed him that he composed himself in a secluded cubicle in the bathroom and, with Kolarov’s threats of female intimacy ringing in his ears, attempted to shave with his left hand. In order to avoid cutting himself he was forced to proceed so carefully that an hour wore away in utter concentration until a white veil swished into his cubicle and he glanced up to see the senior sister frowning down at him. She watched without speaking as he scraped cautiously around his neck, all the while exhibiting that female exasperation for his sex that assumed he would make a mistake merely because he was male.

Finally, she slanted her head to one side and remarked, 'All you had to do was ask, Captain.'

'You are disturbing me,' he informed her.

They had supported his injured shoulder in a sling and he had put the trousers on that Filip brought. One arm he managed to ease into a shirt and he had draped the sleeve of the other over the bandages and fastened three buttons up his chest. Thus attired, he fancied that he looked on the road to recovery. The nurse and her caustic quip had soured that achievement. He was all lather and inexperience.

'You are going to cut yourself,' she said.

'I am not going to cut myself, sister,' he replied coolly, wiping his face with a towel. 'And now, if you please, I'm certain you have better things to do with your time.'

'I do, as a matter of fact. But it took me a while to find you. Your commander is waiting by your bed.'

So certain was Anton that Kolarov could only be there to inform him of catastrophe, and that the nurse had deliberately delayed the announcement because she was a ball-busting man-hater, that he pushed passed her before he broke his own rule and swore at a woman in public.

Sure enough he found the commander pacing around the bed, unable even to sit.

'What?' demanded Anton. ‘What?’

'Thank God!' Filip motioned him aside, brushing a ribbon of sweat from his forehead. 'Where can we talk privately?'

They returned to the cubicle. At the sight of the commander, the sister departed politely.

‘The Luftwaffe has bombed Belgrade,’ Kolarov reported. Punctuated. ‘Yesterday. Easter Sunday. With civilian casualties in the thousands. For our jubilation, Hitler has sworn to teach the Slavs a brutal lesson.’ He paused and Anton heard the suffering in his voice. ‘Four waves and they didn’t even target the military.’

‘Where then?’ asked Anton in a taut whisper.

‘Homes and businesses. The whole city’s ablaze.’

‘Do we mean that little to him?’

Disbelief was in his voice, yes, but a growing recognition of something that was merciless as well.

‘It’s intimidation, Anton. Don’t credit Hitler with any sophistication.’

‘And how did we respond?’

‘Not well. A few dog fights. I told you we weren’t ready, and there is the sense also that some of our positions were betrayed.’

‘What about the naval base? I haven’t heard any planes. How soon will we be attacked? What about my boat?’

‘The Nebojša’s dived at Tivat but nothing’s happened yet. She’s sitting on the bottom of the bay.’ Kolarov checked his watch. ‘It’s half past eight. She’s been there for an hour and a half. Late last night Naval Command was warned by the British about a possible attack this morning and all craft have been ordered to change their positions daily, as long as they have the fuel to do so. Other than that we wait to see if and when the army surrenders. When, I think, sooner than if.’

****

After Kolarov had left the ward, Anton felt bereft. He stared at the two long rows of beds, some empty, a few occupied, and experienced a loneliness he had not felt since he was a child at the end of a long summer's outing. Something had delayed his family – the bank, the tram, he couldn't remember now - and, by the time they arrived, everyone else had gone home except him. Distressing for a man to recall the small hurts of boyhood.

The German attack on Belgrade had profoundly shocked him. As a member of the military there should have been some action to take, yet he could do nothing.

‘Destroy Paris,’ he thought bitterly. ‘Slaughter French civilians without provocation and see how the world reacts.’

Once, as a student, he had been to Paris: a new city then, only seventy or eighty years old, but already the darling of the Western world, as dedicated to style and indulgence as London was to finance. Paris was not to know that to Serbs Belgrade had had the same reputation for pleasure, and he doubted whether it would have cared. Paris was a teenager and just as self-involved. The Nazis would not ravage a city younger than the age of consent, but their ideology justified the destruction of a Slavic population.

The morning sun flooded the long ward and Anton sat on his bed with his head in his hands contemplating with increasing despair the fate of his boat. Since nine o’clock he had heard the drone of bombers and, in reply, the sharp report of anti-aircraft fire. He knew the planes would have to have come from Italy. The Italians had long coveted the Yugoslav coast and were undoubtedly taking advantage of the German invasion to launch their own. The bombers would be targeting ships anchored in the bay and he doubted whether a civilian hospital would be evacuated.

Lunchtime came and went. The sun began its swift descent upon the crags around the water. Three o'clock struck and Anton watched the minutes glide on until a quarter past when the day-nurses, anxious but professional, would gather in their small glassed-in office for the handover to the evening staff. As his case arrived, they would discuss its particular features, his treatment and his progress. Quickly they would move onto the next patient, one or two men after him, then the last one; close their books, smooth their veils, and seal his doom for another night.

His shoulder would not heal while it was condemned here, for healing is holistic and his heart was broken. Briskly he seized the satchel from beneath his bed, sat with it on the sheets and thrust the flap open with his foot. He shoved in his few belongings, ignoring the insistence of the evening nurse who came bustling up, that he wait for the doctor.

On observing that he had no intention of waiting for anyone, she repacked his satchel with hydrogen peroxide, iodine and bandages and begged him to return tomorrow. But he had made up his mind and her plea fell on deaf ears. As she chased him down the ward, he threw the strap over his shoulder and left without a backward glance. He could imagine her expressing his medical sacrilege in outrageous adjectives.

 

 

Adoption, Belonging and Identity - why I write about Yugoslavia

 

Me in Belgrade 1985

I’m not English. I am Yugoslav, Irish and German. Let’s get that straight before we begin. Because I was adopted at birth, identity is my issue. This is what this article is about.

According to the zeitgeist, you have a baby because you love them. You’re gay, or trans, or cis, or whatever you are, but love is what matters.

Okay. The zeitgeist is BS. I am 63 and I have struggled with identity my whole life. You need to know where you come from and you need photos. No child should be conceived without access to photos of their relatives. I didn’t see photos of my relatives until I was 50, but they absolutely opened my world. Here was my hair, my height, my eyes, my whole belonging.

So you might say, my child is happy without photos. But life is long. You don’t give birth to a baby, you give birth to a person and it is that person who will ultimately decide the rights or wrongs of the matter, not you. Unfortunately, when I was born in 1960, the government made the choice that you were a new person without access to your old family. No photos. It was a social experiment and it failed.    

I am an example of why.

I was adopted into a colonial Australian family of English origins, although I’m not English. (About three sixteenths and even two sixteenths of that, my aunt told me, considered themselves Irish. So, we’re down to one sixteenth.)

I cannot be what anyone wants me to be. I have to be myself.

When you’re a child, you do as you’re told. I grew up on English literature, English history, English war stories, English politics, English movies. When I was in kindergarten, we celebrated Empire Day. I read the English novels and poems my mother gave me.

When I was 29, my adoptive father died. My adoptive Mum died when I was 42. The day after her funeral, I met my biological sisters, having met my brother earlier that year.

From that day, everything changed.

As the years went on, I discovered that I no longer enjoyed the English authors Mum had enjoyed. I discovered the truth about English history and English war stories, not the sanitised versions. After marriage to my half Italian husband when I was 31, my tastes began to alter radically.

Now, I really loved my Mum. I loved her family history in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Once she died and my new family began talking about their European roots (which were my roots because we had the same parents) the tug-of-war between the old and the new nearly tore me apart. With a husband and two small children to look after, daily I had this nasty little voice in my head telling me that Mum’s family, which I had loved, was no longer mine because now I had a Real Family. I was one of the Lucky Adoptees who had actually Found Out Where They’d Come From.

This insidious chatterer tortured me. Without mercy it went on and on, week after week until one night three months after Mum died I was in the kitchen washing up while my husband and daughters were watching TV. Suddenly in the dark, Mum was behind me. Suddenly I started to cry. I said, ‘Hi, Mum.’ And then she was gone.

In an instant I was healed. From that brief encounter I knew that Mum’s family and my new family both belonged to me. The Lord had allowed Mum to come and reassure me of that.

People may think I’m crazy being so interested in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, but I look like them. When I got off the train in Belgrade in 1985 and for the first time in my life met people as big as I was, I thought, ‘What is this wonderful place?’ I thought Belgrade was the best city in the whole world. I loved the story of the Yugoslav Partisans in World War 2. When I was only twelve Mum had told me about the women who fought alongside the men.

These Partisans were fighting for the country where I felt I belonged, where half of me had come from. Who I looked like. They impressed the Germans, they impressed the British, they were the only country to stand up to Stalin. I am old enough to remember watching Soviet tanks roll into Prague in 1968 on the TV, merely because Czechoslovakia longed to be free of Moscow. Russia never attempted that stunt in Yugoslavia. Why? One name: Tito. Not a perfect man, but a very interesting one. I loved Yugoslavia because it was wild and mysterious and brave. What did Tito say about it? ‘Yugoslavs are a proud people.’

War is a terrible thing, but I have often wondered, with envy I am ashamed to say, what it would be like to fight passionately for the country where your roots had been for a thousand years or maybe more. How I envy the Australian Aborigines because they belong to the land.

So this is my little piece of history. I like to write about Yugoslavia because I think it’s a great story.

Post Script: It was with some trepidation that I finally took the plunge in April 2024 and had my DNA tested. Below is what awaited me when I opened the email:

My German great grandfather Frank Neimann, who was born in Barth in 1851, has disappeared as has my Italian great grandmother Clementina Cerocchi , born and died in Trieste 1856 - 1916. The 69.4% French was the real surprise. That's from Clementina's husband, Giovanni Tonon. My birth mother knew little about him except that he was an artist and ran a hat store in Trieste with his brother Gastone. She described his origins as 'mysterious' and speculated that he might have been French. 

Well, now we know, although 69.4% does seem an awful lot to get from a great grandfather. 

...three weeks have passed and I have decided that it is impossible to get 69.4% from a great grandfather, so it must be coming from somewhere else. The problem with this theory is that I am in possession of virtually all the births, marriages and nationalization certificates that would disprove it, unless we have serious incest going on and an awful lot of lying.

Have a look at this new table below. This is what happened when I changed the confidence levels on the 23andMe website. (The old results were only 50% confident.) Look at the French when it's 90% confident. Our 69.4% has fallen to 16.9% . Now 16.9% can come from a great grandfather, who is 12.5% plus or minus. (The plus can be pushed up to 22%.) The rest of the WEST section is accounted for by births and marriage records and the naturalization certificate of my German great grandfather.

The EAST section can mostly be accounted for by birth records, with two exceptions. My Slovenian great grandmother we know from the birth records of my grandmother and the testimony of my birth mother. She said she came from a village 100 miles of Istria on the border of Austria. The other exception is my Italian great grandmother Clementina Cerocchi. However, as I got hold of her vital dates from the registry office in Trieste (I walked in off the street), I am reasonably confident.

By looking at the 90% confidence level instead of the 50%, I am left with 38.5% NW Europe whose records I have (except for the Frenchman), and broadly European 35.5%, the records of which I discussed above. 

This makes a great deal more sense.    

Regarding 'broadly European' 23andMe has this to say: 'Much of Europe was buried under miles of ice ten thousand years ago. As the glaciers receded over millennia, Neolithic farmers from western Asia joined Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to settle Europe. Some European DNA is difficult to assign confidently to one population and receives a “Broadly European” designation.'

'Italian by Default'. Adopted? No identity? No problem.

https://www.mwalkeristra.com

 

 

  

 

Rijeka 1919: a decadent poet and an Italian land claim

 

‘Posing for his sexual partner as a martyred saint, Gabriele d’Annuncio was titillating himself with the image of a young man tortured and killed.’

The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annuncio, is an unrivalled story of decadence and hedonism requiring, at times, a suspension of disbelief. Death, sadism and eroticism are constant and intertwining themes, to the extent that I wondered, when d’Annuncio urged young Italians into World War 1, whether he did so for the glory of Italy or for his own sexual pleasure. Hughes-Hallett has no scruples on the matter. ‘Throughout the Great War, d’Annuncio was to refer over and over again, and in increasingly exulted tones, to dead soldiers as “martyrs”, whose deaths must be honoured by the sacrifice of further beautiful youths. What had begun as an erotic fantasy shaped by an aesthetic trend would become a motive for slaughter.’ (1)

Before World War 1, Italy was a poor, politically unstable country wracked by feudal lords and mafiosi, and the exodus of families looking for a better life had already begun to give the world its plethora of Italian restaurants. (Read Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (2), written after Mussolini had locked away the mafia and made the trains run on time.) Abiding by a belief that war, hatred and bloodshed would strengthen it and in order to redeem territory promised to it at the Secret Treaty of London in 1915, Italy deserted its allies, Austria-Hungary and Germany, and sent its young men to World War 1 on a salary of a third of a lire per day (3). My husband’s grandfather travelled from Turin to fight on the northeastern frontier. Because he was illegitimate he was put on the front line in the hope that he would be shot first. It was not until he died in 1971 that the Italian government sent his daughter his war medals which she promptly sent back.

Italy is a strange country, held together by dreams of ancient Rome, the Renaissance and a hasty revision of its modern history textbooks. The last time I was in Turin I went for a walk along the Po and read there a series of mounted plaques glorifying the Risorgimento and the rise of the Italian military, both historical failures and examples of the importance to Italy of its own propaganda.

Indeed, what would Italy do without words? It is built entirely upon them, as The Pike proves. It is a very long book, but it is d’Annuncio’s self-styled takeover of Rijeka in 1919, surfing in on a wave of alcohol and cocaine, that concerns my study of War in the Balkans.

At the time Italy had a population of over 38 million and Croatia just 3 million. It was hardly surprising then that d’Annuncio and his contemporaries could claim Rijeka (Fiume), Istria and Dalmatia as Italian merely because a few Italian businesses had crossed the Adriatic and doubled the population in the cities. Yet it is doubtful for how long even this had been going on, for according to Viscountess Strangford who visited Rijeka in 1863, ‘There was but little Italian to be heard, but much more German, and all the rest Slavonic or Hungarian.’ (4) That there had been an increase in Italian settlers since then is likely, because I noticed a steady increase in Italian surnames in the church registries of my mother's village in Istria after Italian unification in 1860. Nevertheless, in 1910, Maude M Holbach, another British visitor to Dalmatia, recorded the following, ‘The population of Dalmatia at the census of 1890 was 507,000 souls of whom 417,000 are of Croatian stock, 90,000 of Serbian, and 16,000 were returned as Italian, the rest being Austrians, Hungarians and Poles.’ (5) 

The chapters in The Pike concerning the fate of Italian soldiers during the war are horrifying and, after the bloodbath when Italy demanded the Slavic territories promised it in 1915, America's Woodrow Wilson retorted, ‘Why does Italy want all these countries that don’t speak Italian?’ (3) 

The answer in part was Gabriele D’Annuncio, the voice of irredentism. Irredentism was an Italian word which meant land that should be considered unredeemed Italian territory. The criteria were:

i) it had once been part of the Roman Empire,

ii) it had once been part of the Venetian Empire,

iii) a few Italians lived there,

iv) a few Slavs lived there who wanted to be Italian (my grandmother),

v) it was south of the Alps and thus its acquisition made the map of Italy look better (the South Tyrol and the western third of Slovenia).

Istria was a good fit for points i) to iv). My mother, however, felt displaced in Italy and after World War 2, took on Yugoslav citizenship. Of Istria she said, ‘We were Austrian then Austria lost the war, then we were Italian and Italy lost the war.’ These Venetian-speaking Istrians lived on the west coast in a strip so thin that my mother told me that Croatian speakers came to her village of Tar in the 1920’s to buy fish. In the days before refrigeration, they couldn't have lived very far away.

It is evident from The Pike that Gabriele D'Annuncio was a metaphorical magician. Though small and unattractive (some would call him odious and repellent) he cast his spell over countless women who didn’t like the look of him but slept with him anyway, actresses, editors, musicians, politicians, the great mass of the Italian populace and sundry minor aristocracy. His mastery with words and manipulation of emotions invariably got him what he wanted, and it’s only a shame that he didn’t live long enough to see Italy after World War 2 lose all the territory his efforts had gained it.

But let us return to Rijeka in 1919.

The war was over and d'Annuncio was 'foremost among those shaping the story of the war's end as one of Italian humiliation, Italian victimisation.' (1) In Paris, the Allies allowed Italy only temporary occupation of the Croatian coast but delayed in granting it the territory promised in the Secret Treaty of London. D'Annuncio 'swore to fight on for the cause of an Italian Dalmatia' even as Italy slumped into depression and civil war. In an ugly mood, a million and a half demobbed soldiers trained in violence filled the cities and countryside, including the elite Italian troops, the arditi. Feared by the people, these arditi were unwelcome at home, they had nothing to do, and they were itching for a fight. They and d'Annuncio were mutually attracted.

Ignoring Italy's dire economic position, D'Annuncio then produced a series of incendiary speeches in Rome to the effect that Italy should 'seize by force what the peace-makers in Paris refused to grant them.' For his efforts in destabilizing an already unstable country, he was kicked out of Rome by the military authorities and sent back to Venice.

Anxious to belong to a Greater Italy, Rijeka's Italian population wrote to d'Annuncio asking him to lead them. The local arditi prepared to mobilize. Emotions ruled the day and violence towards non-Italians quickly overcame the city. D'Annuncio's ego was fueled and, although the government in Rome would not sanction any action against the city by him, on 11th September 1919 he decided to satisfy his fans and enter Rijeka. As if under d'Annuncio's spell, the Italian general protecting the city for the Allies let him and his arditi pass.

Once installed, however, the poet had no idea how to run a city in ways that didn't mimic his own lifestyle, and Rijeka swiftly became 'a bordello, a refuge for criminals and prostitutes...disorder, corruption and craziness.' 'D'Annuncio ‘staged pseudo-sacred ceremonies in the cathedral…and encourage a cult of his own personality so fervid that the Bishop…noted furiously that his flock were forsaking Christ for this modern Orpheus.’(1)

After three months, the government in Rome offered the citizens of Rijeka the option to remain a free city under the protection of Italy, and a plebiscite voted d'Annuncio out. Yet still he remained, ruling his totalitarian city-state by intimidation while the government commenced a blockade. 

Finally, as the new wave of violent fascism erupted around Trieste and Italian ships trained their guns on Rijeka's harbour, d'Annuncio was ordered to vacate the city by 6pm on Christmas Eve 1920. Three days of fighting came to end when the city begged him to leave.

Gabriele d'Annuncio departed Rijeka on 18th January 1921 and in October 1922 Mussolini marched on Rome.

References

1. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy   The Pike WF Howes 2014

2. Levi, Carlo   Christ Stopped at Eboli, Einaudi 1945.

3. Duggan Christopher   The Force of Destiny, Penguin 2008

 

4. Strangford, Emily Anne Beaufort Smythe   The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863. Richard Bentley, London 1864

5. Holbach, Maude M   Dalmatia, the Land Where East Meets West, 1910. William Clowes and Sons Ltd, London.

His Most Italian City | Mysite (mwalkeristra.com)

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