Abstract
This chapter investigates how the city of Zadar on Croatia’s Adriatic coast relates to its vanished Italian community, the Zaratini. The chapter takes as its starting and orientation point the history of the Luxardo family, one of several Italian families who significantly contributed to the economy, politics and city culture of Zadar before the Second World War. Following the Second World War, the Luxardos, as many other Italians, disappeared from Dalmatia. Most fled or emigrated, but as Luxardo family history shows, in some cases murder and imprisonment were the cause for their dissapearance.
The chapter is based on a study of tow sets of material. One is Zadar’s urban landscape as it looks today; the physical architectural remnants and, in so far as they are invested with historical meaning, “sites of memories” of Zadar’s recent Italian history and the Zaratini. The other set of sources is historical and everyday discourse in the form of written published texts. The chapter analyses the ways in which the Luxardos and other Zaratini are presented in various types of history texts and local newspapers. By combining and comparing the two sets of sources it seeks to capture the relations and dynamics between the more static, physical and monumental representations of memory on the one hand and the more transient, less tangible expressions of memory in everyday discourse on the other. The chapter argues that the two sets of sources reveal a strange grey zone of coexisting memorial strategies in Zadar, fluctuating between recognition and even reconciliation with the history of the Zaratini in newspaper discourse and deliberate silence in the urban landscape.
The chapter is based on a study of tow sets of material. One is Zadar’s urban landscape as it looks today; the physical architectural remnants and, in so far as they are invested with historical meaning, “sites of memories” of Zadar’s recent Italian history and the Zaratini. The other set of sources is historical and everyday discourse in the form of written published texts. The chapter analyses the ways in which the Luxardos and other Zaratini are presented in various types of history texts and local newspapers. By combining and comparing the two sets of sources it seeks to capture the relations and dynamics between the more static, physical and monumental representations of memory on the one hand and the more transient, less tangible expressions of memory in everyday discourse on the other. The chapter argues that the two sets of sources reveal a strange grey zone of coexisting memorial strategies in Zadar, fluctuating between recognition and even reconciliation with the history of the Zaratini in newspaper discourse and deliberate silence in the urban landscape.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Whose Memory? Which Future? : Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe |
| Editors | Barbara Törnquist-Plewa |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Place of Publication | New York, Oxford |
| Publisher | Berghahn Books |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Pages | 143-169 |
| Chapter | 5 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1-78533-122-0 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-78533-123-7 |
| Publication status | Published - 2016 |
| Series | Studies in Contemporary European History |
|---|---|
| Volume | 18 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Humanities
- HISTORY
- Cultural Memory
- forced expulsion
- Croatia
- Zadar
- urban landscape
- media discourse
