Foiba: Genealogy of an Untranslatable Word

After the Fascist regime collapsed on 5 July 1943, the new Italian Government signed an armistice on 8 September 1943. Soon the Italian Eastern-Adriatic territories became a battlefield between the Nazis and the Yugoslav Partisans led by marshal Josip Broz “Tito”. During the advance of the Yugoslav Partisans, fierce retaliations against the Italian population were carried out. What in the beginning appeared as a spontaneous form of revenge against those Italians linked to the Fascist regime, soon revealed itself to be a wider political strategy of the leaders of the Yugoslav Partisans to eliminate the Italian presence in the territories that were being taken over by Tito. On 10 February 1947, in Paris, a treaty was signed among the winners of WWII and Italy: Italy had to cede most of Istria, including the provinces of Fiume (Rijeka), Zara (Zadar), and most of Gorizia and Pola (Pula) to Yugoslavia. These events led to one of the most important diasporas of the XX Century in the Mediterranean, and, at the same time, to one of the most understudied and untold stories. Almost 350.000 people left their home crossing the Mediterranean to reach various Regions of Italy and countries such as Australia, U.S.A, Canada, Argentina and South Africa. Due to many factors, this dramatic history of persecution rapidly was forced into a spiral of silence that left this part of history almost totally unstudied for decades. Starting in 2004, a new political effort was made in Italy to break this “discourse of silence”. This new political phase was driven by the re-emergence and use of the word-concept “foiba”. The “foiba” is a type of deep natural sinkhole widely spread over the Venezia-Giulia region. These sinkholes became dramatically famous because they were used by the Yugoslav Communists to hide the bodies of thousands of people of Italian ethnicity, who were murdered to force all Italians to leave those areas. The aim of my essay is to trace a genealogy of the concept of “foiba”, describing how it has gone under a re-signification during the last two decades. Furthermore, I claim that the word “foiba” has become a concept that symbolizes the pain and suffering of all the Italian exiles from Venezia-Giulia and Dalmazia. “Foiba” bears, therefore, the specificity of this collective trauma, which is, at the same time, the untranslatability inherent to all collective traumas.