Professor Katja Hrobat Virloget, Director of the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Primorska in Koper, focuses on migration and population movements, memory, identity, heritage, folklore, and mythology in her often interdisciplinary research.

In Exodus. The silence of those who remain. The anthropologist explores the memories of those who remained after the exodus: men and women who, in the turbulent post-World War II years, did not leave Istria along with much of the Italian community to reach Italy; people who remained in Yugoslavia and who, from being a majority, became a minority. These voices are uncomfortable for both those who would like to describe the exodus simply as a migration of victims and those who instead see it merely as a choice. Voices silenced for decades are finally telling their stories.

In the complex mosaic of the Julian-Dalmatian exodus, a missing piece now fits: the story of the destinies of the ordinary people who remained, who adapted, who rebuilt a society alongside those who arrived from the interior of Yugoslavia to colonize the Istrian “Wild West.”

A story composed of touching testimonies, collected over ten years using rigorous anthropological methods in the Slovenian coastal area, with one main goal: to abandon stereotypes and finally let silence speak.

Katja Hrobat Virloget, Exodus. The silence of those who remain., Bottega Errante, Udine 2026, 320 pp.