It has been 76 years since the forced exodus of 300,000 of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia
Every year on February 10, Italy celebrates the “Giorno del Ricordo,” or the National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe, a commemoration of the victims of the Foibe massacres and the Istrian-Dalmatian Exodus during and after World War II.
A “foiba,” plural “foibe,” is a natural sinkhole formed by water erosion. Between 1943 and 1947, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the communist Yugoslav partisans, occupied the Italian territories of Dalmatia and Istria. There, his forces sought ethnic cleansing by committing mass killings against the local ethnic Italian population. Civilians were shot and tortured and their corpses were discarded in foibes, according to Wanted in Rome. Many also died in Yugoslav concentration camps and jails.
Following these killings, some 300,000 Italians were forcibly exiled en masse from Istria and Dalmatia when the territories were transferred from Italy to Yugoslavia during the Paris Peace Treaty of February 10, 1947, according to EleA, the University of Salerno’s archive.
On February 10, 2022, Italian news agency Skyt g24 shared a video to Twitter of the mass exodus of ethnic Italians. It wrote: “The #DayofRemembrance aims to keep alive the memory of the victims of the second post-war period on the eastern border, and of the exodus of Istrians, Fiume and Dalmatians from their lands.”
February 10 was cemented as a national day of remembrance in March 2004 by then Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to honor the victims of the tragedy. In 2007, Giorgio Napolitano, Ciampi’s successor from 2005 to 2015, referred to the Foibe as "one of the barbarities of the past century."
Asia London Palomba
Asia London Palomba is a trilingual freelance journalist from Rome, Italy. In the past, her work on culture, travel, and history has been published in The Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura,The Christian Science Monitor and Grub Street, New York Magazine's food section. In her free time, Asia enjoys traveling home to Italy to spend time with family and friends, drinking Hugo Spritzes, and making her nonna's homemade cavatelli.