A year ago, the President of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella and his Slovenian counterpart Borut Pahor paused for a minute of silence in front of the Basovizza Foiba. Starting from that symbolic place, Italy and Slovenia began to look no longer at what divides, but at what unites, with particular reference to the mourning and upheavals caused by Tito's communist dictatorship, both in Venezia Giulia and in Slovenia. To seal this sharing, the Mayor of Trieste Roberto Dipiazza, in whose mandates not only the day of 13 July 2020 but also the Concert of the Three Presidents took place, awarded President Pahor the most important citizen recognition. Slovenia has recently begun its semester of European presidency and it is precisely in the common European belonging that Rome and Ljubljana must continue their dialogue to make it increasingly concrete and fruitful in the coming years.

Nova Gorica and Gorizia European Capital of Culture 2025 already represent a further step forward in this direction: it will be, among other things, a review in which the most tragic pages of the history of Gorizia and more broadly of the eastern Italian border can be brought to the attention of the public opinion. The associations of Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian exiles and OnorCaduti must be involved in the future in the research of the Slovenian authorities regarding foibe and mass graves in which Tito's communist militias carried out their massacres in what is now Slovenian territory, targeting not only exponents of the native Italianity but also anti-communists, priests and Slovenian civilians. Since these joint researches are already taking place in Croatia, we hope that a complete mapping of the places of these massacres can be completed, in such a way as to find the burial place of thousands of our compatriots who disappeared into thin air at the end of the war. Once these terrible dynamics have been reconstructed, the time will have come when a memorial can finally be erected with the names of the victims of Yugoslav partisan violence.

These days, the Vittoriale degli Italiani is hosting the first summer school on the history of the eastern border, thanks to the increasingly intense synergy between the Exodus associations and the Ministry of Education. The hope of many first-generation exiles to see their tragedies recounted in schools throughout Italy is becoming increasingly concrete. And so that the history that the Day of Remembrance has made a heritage of the entire national community can rise to a European level, we trust that new commissions of Italian, Slovenian and Croatian historians will soon meet to deepen and expand the work of the commissions established in the 1990s.

These subsequent shared stages may also facilitate the resolution of the still open questions regarding the abandoned assets and the obligations of the Treaty of Osimo inherited by Ljubljana and Zagreb as successor states of Yugoslavia.

 

Renzo Codarin 
National President ANVGD