After completing the saga about my first journey across former Austria-Hungary, I wanted to close the arc with a special article, telling a part of history that is unknown to the most. Consider this as a spin-off chapter.
When I was in Rijeka, I met a local, through Couchsurfing Hangout. We went for a beer and we talked about our travels, our experiences, our mutual histories, until we touched History. He told me how his grandparents were slaughtered by the Italian fascists, for no reason. One evening, during WWII, fascists retreating as the Titoists troops clinched in, began a series of reprisals against the civil population of Istria and Dalmatia. The main parameter was killing whoever didn’t speak Italian or wasn’t Italian enough.
“And when I travel, people even tell me, ‘Oh but you’re from Croatia, so you’re also Italian!’ — Italians killed me grandparents like animals. How am I Italian?”, this local guy said before lighting a cigarette. I can totally understand his resentment.
You don’t need to wait WWII to talk about racial discriminations in Istria and Dalmatia. Fascists were resolute to clean the region from Slav minorities. Croatian and Slovenian were banned everywhere. The Slavs were put against a wall: learn Italian and salute the Dux or leave…
As I mentioned in my Pula’s article, many Italians didn’t tolerate this situation either. Two cultures shared the same territory in harmony for centuries and now, first the Habsburgs, then the Fascists, wanted to break this peace and put friends or even family members on two sides of an ideological trench. Yes, not only friends, even mixed relationships and families were common place in this area. Even today, you can notice how many Croatians bear Italian names and how many Italians around Trieste, bear Croatian names.
With these tensions already well in place, WWII brought to this region an unprecedented level of atrocities, paralleled only decades later in the Yugoslavian wars.
Foibe Massacres
With the allies clinching, the Fascists began to kill off whoever was suspected to plot against the regime. Obviously the Slavs were always on top of the suspect list. When concrete targets were out of reach, the “black shirts” used to vent their violence on family members of the suspects, not sparing women and children.
And what do you think will happen, when you resort to transversal revenge? A spiral of increasing violence will break out. As soon as the Yugoslav partizans, led by Marshall Tito, broke into Istria and Dalmatia, the reaction was even more brutal than the oppression.
Fascist officials became the new target and likewise, when unreachable, their families and children paid for it.
The Titoist troops used a new approach though. They knew the local geology better than the Fascists. The Karst region is characterised by sinkholes that lead to vertical, deep caves. Their characteristic shape is a reversed funnel: from a small cavity in the ground, a huge cave can open beneath it, even for 100–200 meters deep! These formations are called “foibe”, a sinister name which echoes with “phobia”.
Now imagine you want to exterminate thousands of people, but you’re short of bullets and men. If you’re a psycho Stalinist like Tito, and your men are in search of revenge, your brain can conceive appalling strategies to take your killing business to the next level.
During 1943, Yugoslavian trucks used to knock on the doors of Italian families, but also of Croatian and Slovenian families unwilling to join the communist ideology. They were asked to jump on those trucks, to be escorted to “a safer place”. The excuse sounded credible. It was still war-time, and the territory had just been “liberated” from the Fascists. A counter-offensive was always possible.
However, these trucks would have stopped somewhere in the woods. You would have been intimated to get down and probably, you would have wired to other peers. Then, your group would have asked to walk a few meters into the woods, until you’d have seen a hole, getting bigger and scarier with every step you took. Once on the edge, one of your group would have been shot, and his body would have fallen into the hole, dragging all of you into the abyss.
The only thing you could hope for was to die immediately at the moment of the impact. Not everybody was so lucky. The locals could sometimes hear the screams of the unfortunate survivors crying for help, while pain and horror were turning their poor souls mad, at the bottom of the abyss.
We don’t know the exact number of victims. Most foibe were concealed by Tito’s troops. Others were covered during the following years, when trekking became a thing and these holes became a danger for everyday citizens. Estimates vary from 3,000 to up 60,000 victims.
It is fair to mention that throwing people into sinkholes was not the only killing method used by the Yugoslavian Red Army. Even classic concentration camps were a thing, especially in the inner regions or in South Dalmatia, where foibe were not available.
Foreigners in Their Own Country
This widespread terror convinced the Italian speaking population to leave en masse. The exodus saw more than 300,000 people leaving their lives behind and starting a new existence abroad, overnight. Who had real ties with the fascist regime opted moving to far locations like the US or South America, but others chose even more exotic destinations like Australia or South Africa.
The vast majority, who had nothing to hide, simply relocated to Italy, thinking to receive shelter and protection. That’s what the Istrian and Dalmatians were expecting… However, human nature is complex and often mean.
It was 1946, and Italy wanted to turn page completely. Many regions were leaning more and more towards the opposite side of the political spectrum. The Italian Communist Party was already the biggest Communist party in the West. For the Italian communists, Istrians and Dalmatians were not refugees. They were dirty fascists on the run, who deserved nothing.
Negotiations to lay a relocation plan were tight. It was already a miracle to set up refugees camps around the Italian peninsula and the reaction from the locals was not always enthusiastic. In Bologna, traditionally the most communist city in Italy, the refugees were “welcomed” with a humiliating rain of spits. This is what happens when people judge others without knowing their story, when they judge based on what they heard, without fact-checking. That’s why fact-checking is important. That’s why you should listen to media less, and experience real life more. Get to know the protagonists of historical events. Check different points of view, before issuing easy and superficial verdicts elaborated by primitive hooligan brains! Turn your fucking phone off once in a while and delete as many social media accounts you can, starting from that stupid Facebook or that ridiculous X Twitter or whatever it will is called now!
If you have to use your smartphone, do it wisely. Once in Rijeka, I asked Google Maps if some foiba was there. I had found one already in Pula, but it was covered by a monument very on point.
It is right few steps from Fort Giorgio.Great to remember, but I was too curious (though scared) to see one foiba still open, “alive”, ready to swallow some unlucky trekker.
A Macabre Hike
Google told me I was in luck. One foiba was supposed to be very close to my Airbnb in Rijeka and also close to a great rocky beach, where I could have dipped after, should I have survived the spooky encounter.
Right the first morning in Rijeka, I didn’t think twice and took the bus to reach the area where the foiba was supposed to be. Google Maps said it was in a location called “Jama Bezdan”. There were only 2 Google reviews and the only photo showed a road with trash bins.
- Review 1: “Useful to learn about history”
- Review 2: “It was scary as hell!”
While waiting for the bus I looked at a flyer attached to a wall.
The photo of poor missing Roland sparked some speculation in my mind. He has Alzheimer and we are close to the woods. I assume that if you walk up to these mountains, off trail, you might well fall into a foiba, especially if hidden by the vegetation. I even thought how easy might be to hide corpses if you commit a murder in this area…
When the bus finally arrived, I was welcomed by a typical grumpy driver, who spoke only Croatian. It seems like bus drivers are assholes in every part of the world. It must be a job requirement.
“We are sorry. You are very qualified, but this job requires you to be an asshole and you’re too nice. Thanks for applying and good luck with your future endeavours!”
He even sodded me off when I jumped off just after 3 stations!Anyway, the area I stopped seemed very nice; woods on my left, brand new villas with sea view on my right. Google said I had to walk to the right, across this fancy new residential area.
Who can imagine that behind these high-end mansions a memorial of a dire past is hiding…?I was even suspecting that Google was playing my ass fool as usual!
“Are you sure this is the place? So close to the seaside, in a fancy area. I would expect to find these cavities up on the hills around here, far from urban centres. And if one used to be here, I can bet the very contractors of these houses covered it…”
Well, at some point I noticed the same trash bins I saw on Google. Right behind the bins, the grass opened to form a passage into the tiny wood…
“Here we are I guess…”
As I got into the woods, a strange silence fell around. I must confess that I got nervous from the get-go. On my left I noticed some stone walls and I guessed that a foiba might have hidden there. I took the courage and jumped on the wall… nothing! Just an amass of debris, probably coming from the constructions around the area… Even Google Maps told me to keep walking.
The silence began to fade, replaced by birds singing and some other creatures I couldn’t recognise.
My heart was beating. What if this sinkhole was in the middle of tall grass? Nah, it couldn’t be. There was a clear path across the grass. It means others came to visit the place. It’ll be fine!And then a clearing in the wood opened…
A foiba with its memorial stood there in front of me. Now I could hear another strange sound. It seemed like a frog, but with a lower frequency, and a more metallic timber. It was creepy. Luckily it was plain day-time, like noon, otherwise, that sound would have scared me away. I swear. The “voice” slowed pace as I approach the hole. Though the hole was guarded by a fence, I still approached it as Clarice Sterling approached Hannibal Lecter to the shield…
I got closer, expecting a creepy dark hole in the ground…
But to my surprise the hole was “filled”. Some trees even managed to grow in it. The entrance to the beneath cave was either sealed or so small that the vegetation covered it. I even tried to throw a stone in it to hear if it fell further down. Nope, the sound was a chocked bump in the soft ground.
Well, the atmosphere wasn’t less charged anyway. History was there with its load of horrors and the cross behind me testified those dire events without retain.
The inscription in it was in Croatian, but still clear enough to understand it wanted to remember all the victims of the communist terror.
I stayed there for a while, with the strange creature’s voice as my only company. My brain tried to reproduce the possible screams uttered by the victims fell into that well, but I didn’t want to image what was like lying down there, in the abyss, totally drenched in pain and horror. All I could think was: “Will these barbaric acts ever stop once for all?”
Maybe, but not any time soon… They’re still happening, in more areas than we could expect….
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