
The Istrian-Dalmatian exodus occurred between 1943 and 1960 and was at its most intense in the second half of the 1940s, immediately after the end of the Second World War. The exodus concerned the Istrian Peninsula, which is where the modern-day countries of Italy, Slovenia and Croatia converge, and the coastline of Dalmatia further south along the coast of Croatia. The parts of the eastern Adriatic have longstanding historical ties to Italy, having been parts of the Republic of Venice’s maritime empire between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. As such, they had substantial Italian communities. There were though overlapping Slavic claims to the regions and as Italy was one of the defeated Axis Powers in the Second World War, following the conflict communist Yugoslavia acquired control over Istria and Dalmatia. A mass exodus of ethnic Italians followed and continued through the late 1940s and the 1950s, driven by anti-Italian Yugoslav policies. At least a quarter of a million people left Istria and Dalmatia, with most relocating the short distance to Italy.[1]
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Istrian-Dalmatian exodus chronology of events
The Istrian Peninsula and the Dalmatian coastal region lie along the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea and lie in close proximity to the north-eastern corner of the Plain of Lombardy in northern Italy. In centuries gone by they could be reached in a few days’ travel by going from the Veneto region around the Gulf of Trieste to Istria, while the western coast of Istria is just a hundred kilometers as the crow flies from Venice. As such, these regions are in close proximity to Italy and Venice in particular. It is unsurprising then that as Venice grew into a major trading and colonial power in the late medieval period, with colonies around the Eastern Mediterranean, it acquired control over much of Istria and the Dalmatian coastline. Over time Italians acquired lands here and in the national consciousness Istria and Dalmatia were considered parts of Italy, despite also theoretically lying in the Balkans.[2]

This situation was complicated after the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. The Republic of Venice had been brought to an end in 1797 by the French. After the final defeat of France in the wars, it was not reconstituted. Instead one of the victorious powers, Austria, acquired the Venetian territories, including Istria and Dalmatia.[3] It lost Venice to the new Kingdom of Italy during Third War of Italian Unification (1866), but Istria and Dalmatia remained part of what became the Austro-Hungarian Empire the following year with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. It was in the hope of reacquiring these lost territories that Italy reneged on its alliance with the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the First World War broke out in 1914 and then instead joined the war alongside Britain, France and Russia in 1915. In the resulting peace agreements after the war, Italy acquired Trieste and other parts of Istria, though not all of the territory it had hoped for, some parts of which were obtained by the newly emergent Yugoslav state. Italian nationalists referred to their failure to gain all of Istria and parts of Dalmatia as a ‘mutilated victory’ and it played a role in the subsequent rise to power of Benito Mussolini as the fascist dictator of Italy in 1922.[4]

The Istrian-Dalmatian exodus came about because of Italy’s decision to enter the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany in 1940. The Italians hoped to build a new Mediterranean empire that would include large parts of the Balkans, but by the autumn of 1943 they were broadly defeated and the Yugoslav partisans who formed part of the Allied coalition were already stressing their claims to full ownership of Istria and Dalmatia in the post-war European order. This was duly agreed to and post-1945 the borders were redrawn so that communist Yugoslavia acquired virtually the entirety of both Istria and Dalmatia, the exception being parts of northern Istria including the city of Trieste. These were temporarily turned into the Free Territory of Trieste in 1947.[5]
The Yugoslav government engaged in reprisals against the local Italian population in the closing stages of the war. These are known as the Foibe Massacres and resulted in thousands of deaths.[6] This, along with persecutory policies imposed after the war, saw a mass exodus of ethnic Italians from the Yugoslav lands to Italy itself or the Free Territory of Trieste, while some headed overseas to places like the United States and Australia. The Free Territory of Trieste was dissolved in 1954, with the city of Trieste and its immediate hinterland annexed by Italy and the remainder of the territory granted to Yugoslavia. The final movement of the exodus occurred thereafter in the second half of the 1950s. There is a buoyant movement for Trieste to be made an independent city state again in the early twenty-first century.[7]
Extent of migration during the exodus
Historians and demographers are in agreement that the exodus involved about a quarter of a million people, most of which moved between 1944 and 1949. As with all mass movements that occurred after the Second World War it is difficult to be precise as accurate records were not being kept, millions of people had been displaced during the conflict and borders changed too, making some elements of the migration difficult to track. Still, a maximum figure of 350,000 can be imposed, with the most likely range being between 270,000 and 300,000 for the entire period between 1943 and 1960.[8]
Demographic impact of the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus
The clear long-term demographic impact of the Istrian-Dalmatian Exodus is that Istria and Dalmatia were largely denuded of their Italian communities. This has resulted in more ethnically homogenous modern countries, particularly Croatia, which controls all of Dalmatia and more than four-fifths of the Istrian Peninsula today. Extrapolating from Yugoslav and Italian censuses of the time, in the early 1930s there were nearly a quarter of a million people of Italian ethnicity in the lands of modern-day Croatia, most being in western Istria and Dalmatia. By 1948 this figure had dropped to 76,000, then to 30,000 by the middle of the 1950s and to just over 20,000 by the beginning of the 1960s. Where Italians made up 6% of the population of the Croatian lands prior to the Second World War and were dominant in some parts of Istria and Dalmatia, particularly the coastal regions of western Istria, today the Italian community of Croatia constitutes less than half of one percent. Therefore the impact of the exodus was to almost completely remove the Italian community from the two regions. Many people in Italy today will have a grandparent or great-grandparent that migrated from Istria or Dalmatia in the aftermath of the Second World War.[9]
See also
Explore more about the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus
- Italy, Births and Baptisms, 1806-1900 records collection on MyHeritage
- Italy, Marriages, 1809-1900 records collection on MyHeritage
- Italy, Deaths and Burials, 1809-1900 records collection on MyHeritage
- Italy, Telephone Directories records collection on MyHeritage
- Researching Your Italian Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Italian Civil Registration: Going Beyond the Basics at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Long Distance Italian Genealogy Research at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Gustavo Corni, ‘The Exodus of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia, 1945–56’, in Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (eds.), The Disentanglement of Politics: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–9 (New York, 2011), pp. 71–90.
- ↑ Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (London, 2012).
- ↑ https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/diplomatic/c_venice.html
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/vittoria-mutilata/
- ↑ Erminio Fonzo, ‘Use and Abuse of History and Memory: The Istrian-Dalmatian Exodus and the Current Refugee Flows’, in Migrations and Diasporas, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2017).
- ↑ https://balkaninsight.com/2024/02/09/how-italys-government-polices-teaching-of-wwii-foibe-massacres/
- ↑ https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29822594
- ↑ Corni, ‘The Exodus of Italians’.
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Croatia#Ethnic_groups