Bernard MEARES - Where the Balkans begin

People speaking Slovene in public are unlikely to be from Trieste. The reality is that Slovene is for the home and for the older generation, with Italian for the street and for youth. As my Slovene teacher said once: "There is a shadow of shame about speaking our language dating from the war and pre-war Fascist times, and even from the tense situation after the war, when it was dangerous to speak Slovene in public. And there are many of us who even in Slovene-owned shops speak Italian, out of fear, I am convinced: I know them and I've seen them". Pavel Stranj

says that after the war to speak Slovene was to be taken for a Yugoslav Communist. In short, not much different from Fascist times when to speak the language at all was to attract a beating.
    Ever since the 1940's there has been a steady advance of Italian settlement in the Slovene speaking area, achieved initially through compulsory purchases and the settlement of Istrian exiles, and latterly through the sheer inertia of modern residence patterns and the use of the motor-car.
    Sometimes the hatred is anti-Semitic in its intensity, at other times it seems to be an illusion of your own mind, or the paranoid creation of the inward-looking Slovene minority. It is mingled with a contempt as horrifying as anything one hears about White racism in the Deep South of the United States. Unlike the German-speaking minority in the South Tyrol, the Slovene minority has not turned its back on Italy. The Slovenes cannot do so because they are too widely strung out, scattered along the border in isolated valleys, plateaus and mountain tops. They are also running scared of any Italian backlash. It is small wonder that they are sometimes inward looking and question the motives of the few Italians who wish to cross the language divide and make common cause with them.
    This repressed fear and loathing between Italians and Slovenes is well illustrated in Boris Pahor's writings when he describes the fear of going down from the Slovene villages into the city of Trieste, a fear:
" of the factory where Slovenes have been exploited for centuries" he says, "where they. ....... get given new Christian names and surnames, and stuffed with the grammar of a new language.. ..... As a child, naturally, it is a terror that sears your brain, with the flames from burning buildings, with the torching of the Slovene Theatre in the centre of Trieste. And that feeling of inferiority because you are from a subject race. The Negro's fear of the white man.. ..... The scribbled slogans against Triestino Slovenes such as "Death to the S'ciavi"" .

    Like much of Pahor's literature this novel has not been published in Italian. Very little of Slovene literature from Trieste or the Karst has been published in Italian in fact, though there is a fine Slovene literary tradition in the city, with modern figures of European standing to be encountered: Srecko Kosovel the poet who died tragically young in the nineteen-twenties, Alojz Rebula, the classicist, and others. But Trieste has always turned its back on its own, and even Italo Svevo had to publish his better known novels, Senilità and La coscienza di Zeno, through vanity publishers.

    Diplomatically the Balkans probably began in the chancelleries of the Great Powers where they were doubtless invented, but physically and emotionally they start at the gates to Trieste. This is where the Italian plains give way to the hills along the 1915 confrontation line between the Austrian and Italian armies, 30 km north-west of Trieste city outside the port of Monfalcone. It is the point where Italy proper siphons into Trieste Province down a narrow 10 km wide corridor, running through an area settled since the Dark Ages by Slovenes and surrounded by Slovenia on two sides.
    This region is the Karst or Carso, a region of stunted forests on an infertile limestone plateau where there is little surface water. The Karst is studded with potholes of varying depths, very shallow sumps of fertile land often used for cultivating fruit and vegetables and termed "dolinas", a few deeper potholes called "foibas", and great ramified cave systems such as the Great Cave (Grotta Gigante), one of the biggest known single cave chambers in the world. Amid the Karst scrub, on a hill-top barely inside Italy, floats the grey fortress church of Rupen Tabor, one of Slovenia's many fine mediaeval monuments, like an abandoned battleship. In 1945 more than three quarters of the people living in this corridor, the backbone of Trieste Province, were Slovene. No, not just its spinal cord but the whole province except for the Italian enclave of the city itself, with its submerged Slovene community. This rural area of Slovene settlement links up with a 150 kilometre-long archipelago of Slovene speaking districts stretching along the border with Slovenia past Gorizia and Cividale and up to Italy's Alpine frontier with Austria. From the nineteen-twenties to 1943 awesome efforts were deployed in the pre-war years by Mussolini's Fascists to repress all knowledge of the language, smash the Slovene economy in Italy and wipe its culture from the face of the land. Paradoxically, the objective of complete assimilation seems about to be attained now, just when the Slovene minority has been making economic and cultural progress.
    But it is not only in Trieste City that falsehood rules, the supposedly bilingual outlying suburbs in Trieste Province do not enjoy their full rights. One of Trieste's two Slovene banks has collapsed for reasons that may well justify the group paranoia and siege mentality of the Slovene minority. The local Slovene daily, Primorski Dnevnik -- The Coastal Diary -- is constantly under threat. Slovene TV programming on the Italian public network is limited to a couple of news programmes a day. And the official Slovene Italian station, which in any case is very staid, shuts down at 7.30 in the evening. "Only old ladies will listen to it after that", in the words of one of its programme editors. Another radio station in the area, Radio Opcina, switches unpredictably and clumsily into Italian, and is also terribly old-fashioned by comparison with the Italo-pop and rock stations clogging the Triestino air waves from transmitters flying under the Berlusconi flag. What is wanted, unfortunately is something like the latter, but broadcasting in Slovene.
    And then there are the apparent contradictions, often seemingly at variance with common sense. For instance, in the only Slovene senior high-school in Trieste province, not too far from the city centre, all subjects may well be taught through the medium of Slovene, but all geographical names have to be taught in Italian -- a bit like insisting that during French lessons in Britain all place names be pronounced as in English. There is no provision for university-level teaching in the border area with Slovene as the medium of instruction. Worst of all, university degrees from Slovenia are not recognized in Italy's provinces with Slovene speaking minorities (Trieste, Gorizia and Udine). This means that bilingual Triestino Slovenes must go to Italian universities if they are to compete for most jobs in the public sector. Yet in another minority area of Italy, the German-speaking Alto Adige or South Tyrol, academic degrees from across the border in Austria enjoy parity of treatment with those from Italian universities. In a gratuitous insult, courses in technical subjects due to be conducted in Slovene have sometimes been blocked by administrative obstruction.
    Even the widespread network of Slovene primary schools in Trieste province and the suburbs of the city is under threat, only in part because of the generally declining Italian birth-rate. One former Triestino Slovene administrator claims that there are now only 50 primary school pupils for every 100 enrollments 20 years ago.
    Because of the surrounding hills and an indefinable ill-will on the part of the authorities when they are not putting up inventive bureaucratic obstructions to things Slovene, it would be hard to imagine Trieste city as anything but a declining Italian port with pronounced Right-wing leanings.
    Even if the bilingual status is most honoured in the breach the difference in the visibility of Slovene outside the city is astounding, for a variety of factors. The most important is the closeness of Slovenia to the areas atop the hills rimming the Karst that from there, the Triestino Slovenes can tune into several Slovene radio and TV channels broadcast across the border. After all, Slovenia, 10 kilometres up the road, is 99% Slovene-speaking. Though it is a comparatively small country it is prosperous and independent. It has a capital barely 100 kilometres away, a democratic parliament with all the paraphernalia of a modern ethnic state, a university with 30,000 students, five daily papers, an opera house, six theatres, three television channels, and so forth.
    Even far out into the supposedly bilingual outer suburbs you can still encounter hostility from non-Slav speakers when you try to use Slovene, and the atmosphere can sometimes be cut with a knife at frontier crossings with Slovenia, where the Italian border police rarely know any of the language and do not always disguise their contempt for the new republic or for Slovene speakers. The bulk of Trieste Italians have minimal contact with the nearby republic. Many still turn their backs to the border, some out of suspicion but most out of a general introvert attitude that Trieste is the navel of the universe.
    This city with its heart of stone spreads up the steep slopes and valleys leading to the coastal plateau from the port that forms its core more or less exactly the way Belfast spreads up from the Lough, it is not divided into ghettos. The hatred voiced by boorish Trieste Italians may occasionally compete with that of Protestants in Belfast for Irish Catholics but does not rival the bestiality of Milosevic's nationalist Serb army and militias in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia. Your average Triestino can be so Right Wing as to have a black shirt woven into his soul but his conflict with the Slavs is more subdued. At least for the moment.