Istrian Exodus - Overview of The Exodus

Overview of The Exodus

The Italians in Slovenia and Croatia were mostly an indigenous population (in 1910 they accounted for more than a third of the local inhabitants), bolstered by new arrivals or the so-called regnicoli, never well liked by the indigenous Venetian-speaking Istrians, who arrived between 1918–1943, when Primorska and Istria, Rijeka, part of Dalmatia, and the islands of Cres, Krk, Lastovo, and Palagruža were part of Italy. The Italian 1936 census indicated approximately 230,000 people who listed Italian as their language of communication in what is now the territory of Slovenia and Croatia, then part of the Italian state (ca. 194,000 in today’s Croatia and ca. 36,000 in today’s Slovenia). From the end of World War II until 1953, according to various data, between 250,000 and 350,000 people emigrated from these regions. One-third were Slovenes and Croats who opposed the Communist government in Yugoslavia, while two-thirds were ethnic Italians, the so-called optanti emigrants who were living permanently in this region on 10 June 1940 and who expressed their wish to obtain Italian citizenship and emigrate to Italy. The emigration of Italians reduced the total population of the region and altered its historical ethnic structure.

In 1953, officially, only 36,000 Italians lived in Yugoslavia, 16% of the Italian population before World War II. In 2002, according to official Slovenian and Croatian censi only 23,398 people had declared to be of Italian nationality albeit the number of people speaking Italian is certainly larger, because in Istria the knowledge of Italian has not to be restricted to the population of Italian nationality and ethnicity. Indeed, since the dissolution of Yugoslavia, a significant portion of the population of Istria opted for a regional declaration in the census instead of a national one. Those people, albeit ethnically Slavs, have a near-native competence of Italian. Interestingly, the number of people resident in Croatia and declaring themselves to be Italian nearly doubled between 1981 and 1991 censi (i.e. before and after the dissolution of Yugoslavia).