| Provincia di Zara | |
|---|---|
| Province of the Kingdom of Italy | |
| 1920–1947 | |
 Flag  Coat of arms | |
 The province of Zara in 1936 | |
| Capital | Zara |
| History | |
| • Type | Constitutional monarchy |
| History | |
• Italian conquest | 4 November 1918 |
| 12 November 1920 | |
| 10 February 1947 | |
The Province of Zara (Italian : Provincia di Zara) was a province of the Kingdom of Italy, officially from 1918 to 1947. In 1941 it was enlarged and made part of the Italian Governorate of Dalmatia, during World War II, until 1943.
In 1915 Italy entered World War I under the provisions set in the Treaty of London. In exchange for its participation with the Triple Entente and in the event of victory, Italy was to obtain Austro-Hungarian territory in northern Dalmatia, including Zara, Sebenico and most of the Dalmatian islands. At the end of the war, Italian military forces invaded Dalmatia and seized control of Zara, with Admiral Enrico Millo being proclaimed the "Governor of Dalmatia". [1] Famous Italian nationalist Gabriele d'Annunzio supported the seizure of Dalmatia, and proceeded to Zara in an Italian warship in December 1918. [1]
During 1918, political life in Zara intensified. The dissolution of Austria-Hungary led to the renewal of national conflicts in the city. With the arrival of the Royal Italian Army in the city on 4 November 1918, the Italian faction (that was the huge majority in the city) gradually assumed control, a process which was completed on 5 December when it took over the governorship. [2] With the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) Italian claims on Dalmatia contained in the Treaty of London were nullified, but later on the agreements between Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Kingdom of Yugoslavia) set in the Treaty of Rapallo (12 November 1920) gave Zara with other small local territories to Italy.
The Zara enclave, a total of 104 square kilometres (40 square miles), included the city of Zara, the municipalities of Boccagnazzo/Bokanjac, Borgo Erizzo/Arbanasi, Cerno, part of Dicolo/Diklo (a total of 51 km2. of territory and 17,065 inhabitants) and the islands of Lagosta and Pelagosa (53 square kilometres (20 square miles), 1,710 inhabitants). The territory was organized into a small Italian province.
Fascist Italy, and other Axis powers, invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941. Zara held a force of 9,000 Italian army soldiers and was one of the starting points of the invasion. The force under the command of General Vittorio Ambrosio defeated easily the Royal Yugoslav Army in crisis and reached in a few days Sebenico and Spalato on April 15 (2 days before Yugoslavian surrender). Civilians were previously evacuated to Ancona and Pola. Occupying Mostar and Dubrovnik (Ragusa in Italian), on April 17 they met Italian troops that had started out from Italian Albania.
Within a few weeks, Benito Mussolini required the newly formed puppet-state, the so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH) to hand over almost all of Dalmatia (including Spalato/Split) to fascist Italy under the Rome Treaties. The city became the center of a new Italian administrative territorial entity, called Governorate of Dalmatia, that included the enlarged province of Zara, the new Province of Spalato, and the new Province of Cattaro. Under Italian Fascist reign, at the end of 1941 the Slavic population was subjected to a policy of forced Italianization (related to the history of Venetian Dalmatia [3] ). Many public works were done, like new hospitals and sewages. The Province of Zara in 1942 had a population of 211,900 inhabitants and an area of 3,179 km2.
After Mussolini was removed from power on 25 July 1943 and arrested, the government of Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies on 3 September 1943, which was made public only on 8 September 1943, and the Italian army collapsed. However, just four days later on 12 September 1943, "Il Duce", was rescued by a German military raid from his secret prison on the Gran Sasso mountain, and formed the Nazi-puppet Italian Social Republic in the north of the country. The NDH proclaimed the Rome Treaties to be void and occupied Dalmatia with German support. The Germans entered Zara first, and on September 10 the German 114th Jäger Division took over.
The city was prevented from joining the NDH on the grounds that Zara itself was not subject to the conditions of the Rome Treaties. Despite this, the NDH's leader Ante Pavelić designated Zadar as the capital of Sidraga-Ravni Kotari (one of the counties of the NDH), although its administrator was prevented from entering the city by the Italian authorities of the city. Zara remained under the local administration of the Italian Social Republic. Zara was bombed by the Allies, with serious civilian casualties. Many died in the carpet bombings, and many landmarks and centuries old works of art were destroyed. A significant number of civilians fled the city.
In late October 1944 the German army and most of the Italian civilian administration abandoned the city. [4] On October 31, 1944, the Partisans seized the city, until then an official part of Mussolini's Italian Social Republic. At the start of World War II, Zadar had a population of 24,000 (nearly all Dalmatian Italians) but, by the end of 1944, this had decreased to 6,000. [4] Formally, the city remained under Italian sovereignty until September 15, 1947 [5] (Paris Peace Treaty).
After World War II's end, the "Libero comune di Zara in esilio" (Free city of Zara in exile) was created by the exiled Italians of Zara, as a follow-up of the province of Zara.
The Italian exodus from the city continued and in a few years was almost total. The last stroke to the Italian presence was made by the local administration in October 1953, when the last Italian schools were closed and the students forced to move, in one day, into Yugoslavian schools, putting an end to the Romance identity of the city. Today the Italian community counts only a few hundred people, gathered into a local community (Comunità degli Italiani di Zara). [6]
Before World War II there only a few localities in the province of Zara, like Boccagnazzo/Bokanjac and Borgo Erizzo/Arbanasi. But with the enlargement in 1941 the number grew to 20 (first in Italian the official name and then in Croatian the actual):: [7]
The municipality-island of Lagosta/Lastovo was transferred to the Province of Spalato.
Dalmatia is one of the four historical regions of Croatia, alongside Central Croatia, Slavonia and Istria, located on the east shore of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia.
Zadar ; historically known as Zara, is the oldest continuously inhabited city in Croatia. It is situated on the Adriatic Sea, at the northwestern part of Ravni Kotari region. Zadar serves as the seat of Zadar County and of the wider northern Dalmatian region. The city proper covers 25 km2 (9.7 sq mi) with a population of 75,082 in 2011, making it the second-largest city of the region of Dalmatia and the fifth-largest city in the country.
Province of Spalato was a province of the Italian Governorate of Dalmatia, created in May 1941 during World War II. It lasted until September 1943.
Italian irredentism was a political movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Italy with irredentist goals which promoted the unification of geographic areas in which indigenous peoples were considered to be ethnic Italians. At the beginning, the movement promoted the annexation to Italy of territories where Italians formed the absolute majority of the population, but retained by the Austrian Empire after the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866. During World War I the main "irredent lands" were considered to be the provinces of Trento and Trieste and, in a narrow sense, irredentists referred to the Italian patriots living in these two areas.
The History of Dalmatia concerns the history of the area that covers eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea and its inland regions, from the 2nd century BC up to the present day.
The Istrian–Dalmatian exodus was the post-World War II exodus and departure of local ethnic Italians as well as ethnic Slovenes, Croats, and Istro-Romanians from Yugoslavia. The emigrants, who had lived in the now Yugoslav territories of the Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, largely went to Italy, but some joined the Italian diaspora in the Americas, Australia and South Africa. These regions were ethnically mixed, with long-established historic Croatian, Italian, and Slovene communities. After World War I, the Kingdom of Italy annexed Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and parts of Dalmatia including the city of Zadar. At the end of World War II, under the Allies' Treaty of Peace with Italy, the former Italian territories in Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and Dalmatia were assigned to the nation of Yugoslavia, except for the Province of Trieste. The former territories absorbed into Yugoslavia are part of present-day Croatia and Slovenia.
The bombing of Zadar during the Second World War by the Allies lasted from November 1943 to October 1944. Although other large cities in Italy were also bombed, the bombing of Zadar stands out because of the number of attacks and the number of fatalities. Reports vary greatly; the Allies documented 30 bombing raids, while contemporary Italian accounts claim 54. Fatalities recorded range from under 1,000 to as many as 4,000 of the city's 20,000 inhabitants.
Dalmatian Italians are the historical Italian national minority living in the region of Dalmatia, now part of Croatia and Montenegro.
The Governorate of Dalmatia was a territory divided into three provinces of Italy during the Italian Kingdom and Italian Empire epoch. It was created later as an entity in April 1941 at the start of World War II in Yugoslavia, by uniting the existing Province of Zara together with occupied Yugoslav territory annexed by Italy after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers and the signing of the Rome Treaties.
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Angelo Antonio Frari was a Dalmatian Italian physician, who served as the municipal physician and the head of the lazaretto of Split, province of Spalato (1806–1821), the protomedicus, and the president of the Maritime Health Magistrate of Venice (1835–1843), famous epidemiologist and historian of medicine.
The Autonomist Party was an Italian-Dalmatianist political party in the Dalmatian political scene, that existed for around 70 years of the 19th century and until World War I. Its goal was to maintain the autonomy of the Kingdom of Dalmatia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as opposed to the unification with the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia. The Autonomist Party has been accused of secretly having been a pro-Italian movement due to their defense of the rights of ethnic Italians in Dalmatia. The Autonomist Party did not claim to be an Italian movement, and indicated that it sympathized with a sense of heterogeneity amongst Dalmatians in opposition to ethnic nationalism. In the 1861 elections, the Autonomists won twenty-seven seats in Dalmatia, while Dalmatia's Croatian nationalist movement, the National Party, won only fourteen seats. This number rapidly decreased: already in 1870 autonomists lost their majority in the Diet, while in 1908 they won just 6 out of 43 seats.
In 1918–1920, a series of violent fights took place in the city of Split between Croats and Italians, culminating in a struggle on 11 July 1920 that resulted in the deaths of Captain Tommaso Gulli of the Italian protected cruiser Puglia, Croat civilian Matej Miš, and Italian sailor Aldo Rossi. The incidents were the cause of the destruction in Trieste of the Slovenian Cultural Centre by Italian Fascists.
Italians of Croatia are an autochthonous historical national minority recognized by the Constitution of Croatia. As such, they elect a special representative to the Croatian Parliament. There is Italian Union of Croatia and Slovenia, in Croat Talijanska Unija, in Slovene Italijanska Unija, which is Croat-Slovene organization with main site in Fiume-Rijeka and secondary site in Capodistria-Koper of Slovenia.
Italian irredentism in Dalmatia was the political movement supporting the unification to Italy, during the 19th and 20th centuries, of Adriatic Dalmatia.
The 1941 Treaties of Rome were a series of treaties concluded by the Fascist Italian regime and the World War II collaborationist Independent State of Croatia on 18 May 1941, following the Axis Invasion of Yugoslavia. The treaties determined the borders between the NDH and Italy, effectively ceding territory largely organised as the Governorate of Dalmatia to the latter. They also prohibited the NDH from deploying naval forces to the Adriatic Sea, and restricted movement of its troops in the Italian-controlled part of the NDH.
Stevo Rađenović was a Yugoslav Radical Union politician during the interwar period and a Chetnik leader in the Lika region of the Axis puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. He was a prominent leader of the July 1941 Srb uprising against the genocidal Ustaše-led NDH government, and was the first Chetnik leader in the region to reach an understanding with the Royal Italian Army in order to collaborate with them against the Yugoslav Partisans.
Giacomo Vuxani was an Italian politician and patriot born in the Arbanasi village of Borgo Erizzo, a suburb of Zadar.
Vincenzo Serrentino was an Italian Fascist politician and civil servant, prefect of the Province of Zara from November 1943 to October 1944.
NK Arbanasi is a football club from the village of Arbanasia near Zadar. Founded in 1910 as NK Zmaj, it is one of the oldest football clubs in Croatia in continuous existence.