Istria is the largest peninsula within the Adriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Kvarner Gulf. It is shared by three countries: Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy, with 90% of surface area being part of Croatia. Croatia encapsulates most of the Istrian peninsula within Istria County.
The Free Territory of Trieste was an independent territory in Southern Europe between northern Italy and Yugoslavia, facing the north part of the Adriatic Sea, under direct responsibility of the United Nations Security Council in the aftermath of World War II. For a period of seven years, it acted as a free city.
The Paris Peace Treaties were signed on 10 February 1947 following the end of World War II in 1945. The Paris Peace Conference lasted from 29 July until 15 October 1946. The victorious wartime Allied powers negotiated the details of peace treaties with those former Axis powers, namely Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland, which had switched sides and declared war on Germany during the war. They were allowed to fully resume their responsibilities as sovereign states in international affairs and to qualify for membership in the United Nations. Nevertheless, the Paris Peace Treaties avoided taking into consideration the consequences of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose secret clauses included the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the occupation of the Baltic States, and the annexation of parts of Finland and Romania. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact changed the borders agreed after the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), and was signed on August 23, 1939. One week later, World War II started with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, followed three weeks later by the Soviet invasion of Poland, which was completely erased from the map. In the following years, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union changed the borders established by the peace treaties at the end of World War I.
The Treaty of Rapallo was an agreement between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in the aftermath of the First World War. It was intended to settle the Adriatic question, i.e. Italian claims over territories promised to the country, in return for its entry into the war, against Austria-Hungary; claims that were made on the basis of the 1915 Treaty of London. The wartime pact promised Italy large areas of the eastern Adriatic. The treaty, signed on 12 November 1920 in Rapallo, Italy, generally redeemed the promises of territorial gains in the former Austrian Littoral by awarding Italy territories generally corresponding to the peninsula of Istria and the former Princely County of Gorizia and Gradisca, with the addition of the Snežnik Plateau, in addition to what was promised by the London treaty. The articles regarding Dalmatia were largely ignored. There Italy received the city of Zadar and several islands. Other provisions of the treaty contained safeguards for the rights of Italian nationals remaining in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and provisions for commissions to demarcate the new border, and facilitate economic and educational cooperation. The treaty also established the Free State of Fiume, the city-state consisting of the former Austro-Hungarian Corpus Separatum that consisted of Rijeka and a strip of coast giving the new state a land border with Italy at Istria.
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.
Northeast Italy is one of the five official statistical regions of Italy used by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), a first level NUTS region and a European Parliament constituency. Northeast encompasses four of the country's 20 regions:
The Julian March, also called Julian Venetia, is an area of southeastern Europe which is currently divided among Croatia, Italy, and Slovenia. The term was coined in 1863 by the Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, a native of the area, to demonstrate that the Austrian Littoral, Veneto, Friuli, and Trentino shared a common Italian linguistic identity. Ascoli emphasized the Augustan partition of Roman Italy at the beginning of the Empire, when Venetia et Histria was Regio X.
The Austrian Littoral was a crown land (Kronland) of the Austrian Empire, established in 1849. It consisted of three regions: the Margraviate of Istria in the south, Gorizia and Gradisca in the north, and the Imperial Free City of Trieste in the middle. The region has been contested frequently, with parts of it controlled at various times by the Republic of Venice, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Yugoslavia among others.
The Slovene Littoral is one of the five traditional regions of Slovenia. The littoral in its name - for a coastal-adjacent area - recalls the former Austrian Littoral, the Habsburg possessions on the upper Adriatic coast, of which the Slovene Littoral was part.
The Istrian–Dalmatian exodus was the post-World War II exodus and departure of local ethnic Italians as well as ethnic Slovenes and Croats 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 most recent enlargement of the European Union saw Croatia become the European Union's 28th member state on 1 July 2013. The country applied for EU membership in 2003, and the European Commission recommended making it an official candidate in early 2004. Candidate country status was granted to Croatia by the European Council in mid-2004. The entry negotiations, while originally set for March 2005, began in October that year together with the screening process.
Italy–Yugoslavia relations are the cultural and political relations between Italy and Yugoslavia in the 20th century, since the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 until its dissolution in 1992. Relations during the interwar years were hostile because of Italian irredentist demands to Yugoslav territory, leading to Fascist Italy and the Axis Powers invading Yugoslavia during World War II. After lingering tensions after the war over the status of the Free Territory of Trieste, relations improved during the Cold War.
The foibe massacres, or simply the foibe, refers to mass killings and deportations both during and immediately after World War II, mainly committed by Yugoslav Partisans and OZNA in the then-Italian territories of Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, against the local ethnic Italian population, and local ethnic Slavs and Istro-Romanians, according to some historians due to presumed collaboration with Axis forces, political affiliation or opposition to Titoism and motivations of ethnic hatred by the Yugoslav forces.
Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Slovenia and Croatia became independent countries. As the border between the countries had not been determined in detail prior to independence, several parts of the border were disputed, both on land and at the sea, namely in the Gulf of Piran.
This is a survey of the postage stamps and postal history of Slovenia.
Istrian Italians are an ethnic group from the Adriatic region of Istria in modern northwestern Croatia and southwestern Slovenia. Istrian Italians descend from the original Latinized population of Roman Histria, from the Venetian-speaking settlers who colonized the region during the time of the Republic of Venice, and from the local Croatian people who culturally assimilated.
Mutilated victory is a term coined by Gabriele D’Annunzio at the end of World War I, used to describe the dissatisfaction of a part of Italian nationalists concerning territorial rewards in favor of the Kingdom of Italy after the conflict.
Istria is the largest peninsula in the Adriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Bay of Kvarner. It is shared by three countries: Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy.
On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact with the Axis powers. The agreement was reached after months of negotiations between Germany and Yugoslavia and was signed at the Belvedere in Vienna by Joachim von Ribbentrop, German foreign minister, and Dragiša Cvetković, Yugoslav Prime Minister. Pursuant to the alliance, the parties agreed that the Axis powers would respect Yugoslav sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the Axis refraining from seeking permission to transport troops through Yugoslavia or requesting any military assistance.
From the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957 until the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, thus during the Cold War period, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the first socialist state to develop relations with the organisation. Notwithstanding occasional and informal proposals coming from both sides, Yugoslavia never became a full member state of the EEC.
