Towards the end of the 80s, in the Port of Trieste, work was underway on the construction of the Adria Terminal, a modern port infrastructure for the import and export of goods by ship. In order to have the space necessary for the construction of the new facility, two warehouses in the old Austro-Hungarian port had to be demolished; warehouse 21 and 22, both buildings overlooking the sea. These warehouses, however, were not empty. Over the years, the household goods of Istrian exiles had been collected inside them, deposited in Trieste and also collected from the approximately 120 refugee camps present throughout the country. In the 50s and 60s, after leaving the temporary reception villages, many exiles returned to the warehouses to take back their possessions. But this was not the case for everyone. Many of them had died, while others had left Italy or even the Old Continent; : Others, more simply, no longer had the space necessary to rearrange in their new home (or in the garages of refugee camps) all the objects that had once belonged to them. Therefore, hundreds of pieces of furniture and personal effects were left in the warehouses. After the years of the economic boom, in which many goods had returned to their rightful owners, in 1978 there was the last public appeal to remove the respective objects from the warehouses. In those years, however, no one had gone to collect anything. When it came to the point of having to demolish the aforementioned warehouses, they were found still full of furniture and objects that had belonged to the exiles and, thus, the debate began on what to do with the masserize collected inside them. The State, after the intervention of the Prefecture of Trieste, labeled all the remaining goods with the name of "Res Derelicte", or "Abandoned Things" and, consequently, decided to appropriate them to distribute them to organizations and associations scattered throughout the territory. However, controversy arose around this act because pigeons, mice and insects had entered the warehouses that had been left unattended for many years and therefore it was believed that the furniture contained therein was dirty, infected and contaminated; this is why the idea of ​​demolishing the warehouses with all their contents began to take hold. Taking the several quintals of household goods to the landfill would have been too expensive. In 1987, following the large gathering that the Istrian exiles organized in Grado, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the exodus that symbolically began in 1947, the Istrian-Julian-Dalmatian people rose up, indicating to the State that the contents of the warehouses could not end up in the waste bin as they were symbolic elements of their history. Then the Prefecture, through an act, identified the newborn Regional Institute for Istrian Culture, the appropriate institution to which to donate the household goods so that it could draw all the elements to bear witness to its sad story. Consequently, the IRCI became the "owner" of the household goods. Subsequently, the latter had to be compulsorily moved elsewhere and it was decided to transfer them to "Warehouse 26", a place considered the most suitable by the then Deputy Director of the Port Authority, Franco Degrassi, now number one of the IRCI. Therefore, it was necessary to put together several teams of volunteers to move as many objects as possible in the space of 6 months; hundreds of cubes of furniture and objects belonging to the various families who had been displaced. Unfortunately, the "move", due to the poor ability to transfer the heavier objects and the limited time, was done in a makeshift manner and, in this way, the packages of objects fell apart, which, once transferred to their new location, were piled up in bulk without any possibility of being able to organize them according to criteria. More than half of the total was then left behind and many goods were also lost following a fire. Today, thanks to the great work done by those young volunteers, about 2000 cubic meters of household goods remain. Towards the end of the 90s, thanks to the IRCI, the household goods were recatalogued when the Port forced the institution to vacate Warehouse 26 as it was identified as the first warehouse to be restored for the renewal of the Old Port. Therefore, all the household goods were transferred again to the nearby “Warehouse 18” and remained there for many years. In 2013, the Roman singer-songwriter Simone Cristicchi, together with the journalist Jan Bernas, author of the book “They called us fascists, we were Italians”, staged the theatrical performance called “Magazzino 18”, bringing to light in front of 60 million Italians the events of the Julian, Fiuman, Istrian and Dalmatian exodus; events that until then were unknown to most. From that moment, the history of the Istrian people became the object of great interest for many and so it was that numerous requests for access to Magazzino 18 began to arrive at the IRCI to be able to observe the household goods in person.

Today, after more than a decade, thanks to the lifelong commitment of IRCI Director Piero Del Bello and his team of volunteers, all the household goods that have survived to this day have been collected and placed inside “Magazzino 26”, a new major cultural attraction in the Old Port of Trieste on which the current Municipal Administration is placing a lot of emphasis for the relaunch of the Trieste museum system and the city's tourist reception system. The household goods have now been merged with the purely museum material once collected in the historic headquarters in Via Torino, in the heart of the Julian capital. The household goods, which can be touched today, are the last concrete testimony of a tragedy such as the exodus of the Julian, Fiume, Istrian and Dalmatian populations, which occurred during the period of maximum effectiveness of the process of ethnic cleansing implemented by the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz known as “Tito”, against all those citizens of Italian nationality (and not only) who did not want to embrace the ideals of the Yugoslav-Communist government. The exodus involved all the inhabitants of the territories ceded by Italy to Yugoslavia with the Treaty of Paris and also Dalmatia, where the Italian Dalmatians lived. The massacres of the foibe and the Julian-Fiuman-Dalmatian exodus are remembered today, on February 10 of each year, on the Day of Remembrance, a national civil solemnity of the Italian Republic established in March 2004.

Gabriele Turco
Source: Trieste All News – 22/02/2022