With this in mind, it is not surprising that whether Istria, Trieste, the Karst area and Rijeka should be positioned in the Italian or in the Balkan geographical region was greatly discussed throughout the twentieth century, with no common view emerging.
Today, the geographic space, the geographic text, can be interpreted in various ways. Considering Europe as a giant peninsula divided into different branches or other peninsulas that emerge from its continental mass, the Balkans could be perceived as a mountainous extension of Eastern Europe that joins the Mediterranean at the Adriatic, the Ionian and the Aegean seas. Or perhaps, following the ideas of the well-known Balkan scholar Traian Stoianovich, the region could be considered as a shield that extends from the Adriatic across the Aegean towards Anatolia, its Asian counterpart, forming a single world – a bridge between Asia and Europe, a place where Europe and Asia come together. After all, in the nineteenth century, the Balkans were still the Near East and therefore Asia. In all this discussion about geographical facts, it is clear that the Adriatic surrounds a Balkan world that is important to the continent.
It is a Balkan world, or a south-eastern European one. According to Croat geographers, Croatia belongs to central Europe on one side and to the Mediterranean on the other, and it defines the Balkan region (south-eastern Europe). There is also a revival in Germany of the vision of Europe based on cultural regions, Kulturkreise. From this perspective, Mitteleuropa, the central Europe which has formed in the last two centuries includes on its southern side Trieste, Istria, present-day Slovenia and Croatia, and Dalmatia. In other words, central Europe is expanding southwards. And the Mediterranean, as a geographic region, is perhaps retreating. In short, the geography of the Adriatic, especially on its eastern side, is still evolving.
There is no doubt that multiple geographies converge within and around the Adriatic. The Adriatic area also has a linguistic geography, where its western part is historically associated with Italian, the eastern part with Slovenian, with ramifications of Italian (in Istria and Rijeka), Croatian, Serbian, Albanese and Greek. That is today a total of six languages for seven states. Naturally, there are also dialect variations, the true linguistic panorama of the sea: various versions from Apulia, Molise, Abruzzo, Marche, Romagna, Veneto and Friuli. And then there is the Slovene spoken along the coasts, various forms of Čakavian Croatian, Štokavian Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, the two variants of Albanian, Gheg and Tosk, and neo-Greek. And underlying the standard national cultures is the religious and confessional geography. Catholicism is the main religion in Italy, Slovenia and Croatia (four-fifths of the coast), and also northern Albania. The Serbian Orthodox Church prevails in the Dalmatian and Herzegovina hinterland, along the coasts of Montenegro and in the small community of Trieste and Rijeka. The Montenegrin Orthodox Church dominates in Montenegro, and the Greek-Albanian Church in southern Albania. Islam is found in the Herzegovina hinterland and throughout most of Albania, especially in the central part (Durrës and Tirana). Until the nineteenth century, these were lands that evoked the Orient but also a certain Homeric classicism.
The economic and social transformations that have taken place over the last century – modernization, the vision and national concept of territories and coasts, nationalization of the sea itself in legal and political terms, and in symbolic and imaginary terms, in short, all those aspects of a world that is closer to us today – have hidden the memory of an Adriatic that no longer exists. It was a sea of synergies between shores and peoples in a common Adriatic life. The historic relationship between the hinterland and the coasts has also been forgotten. It is hard today to imagine the duration, the continuity of customs, actions, ways of life, the resources, the sea. Historians themselves are divided into categories of scholars of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Early Modern, Modern and Contemporary Ages, and they fail to see the structural features that lie beyond their particular period of study. Yet, on a local and regional scale, the first archaeological finds and earliest testimonies point to a continual repetition of activities from ancient times. It is a continuity, or rather a reinterpretation, that has only disappeared in the contemporary age with industrialization.
The Adriatic we have lost, just like the rest of the Mediterranean, was a sea that created interdependencies between the coasts, and between the coast and the hinterland. There was widespread economic synergy at various geographic levels, side by side with a migratory mobility between the coastal regions. Everywhere there was an economic and social, and also cultural, dualism between the sea and the hinterland. Regarding coast-to-coast relations, the Adriatic is a narrow sea that has always allowed those navigating it in rowing boats, or sailing boats, or ships with oars and sails to refer to both sides of the sea. From Ancona or Rimini, the Roman trireme, with their three banks of oars, stopped at Pola (Pula) on their way to the Gradus (Grado) in Aquileia. Zigzagging between one coast and the other, stopping on both sides, was taken for granted in Adriatic navigation, which required detailed knowledge of the coast, of the perilous reefs to the east and the shallows to the west. Mastering the Adriatic in a maritime context meant knowing its currents and its shores intimately, having a perception of its size which was measured in days of navigation. Adriatic navigation involved small vessels, which was the genuine maritime nature of the Mediterranean. To understand the intensity of relations between the coasts, the various contexts in the upper Adriatic (lagoons, Istria, Romagna), the middle Adriatic (Istria, Marche, Abruzzo, Dalmatia), and the lower Adriatic (Apulia, Albania, Greece) has to be allowed for. Account also has to be taken of the frequent and predictable navigation between the extremes, such as Trieste–Apulia or Venice–Ionian Islands, in other words the oblique dimension of the Adriatic.
The relationship between the coast and the hinterland was also important. The first example that comes to mind, because repeatedly cited in the literature, is the transhumance carried out between the mountains of Abruzzo and the Tavoliere Plain in Apulia. This is a seasonal movement of animals and people, the origins of which are lost in time. Reciprocity and difference: dualism. The ancient Samnites were proud of their pastoral civilization with respect to the Iapygians and the Daunians of the Tavoliere Plain who were farmers and open to Hellenization. The same can be said of the eastern shore where Greek colonies adjusted to living with, albeit separate from, Illyrian peoples. Archaeological finds from Roman Dalmatia show the integration between a strongly Romanized maritime front with a capital like Salona, and the deeper hinterland inhabited by Illyrian pastoralist peoples amenable to serve in the legions, as were the Dalmatians on the limites of the empire. The same dualism and reciprocity was perceived in the Middle Ages, and also in the Modern Age, despite the division between Venetian coastal Dalmatia and the Ottoman eyalet of Bosnia. It could also be seen in the late nineteenth century, when ‘Turkish’ caravans reached Šibenik and Split from the inland, represented as a picturesque curiosity of the Near East. Caravans crossed the Balkans and united the Aegean with the Adriatic Sea. It is said that the last camel caravans were travelling the route between Thessaloniki and Skopje, and then on to Sarajevo, as late as the 1920s.
For centuries, mule caravans came down to Trieste from Carinthia and Carniola; flocks and herds travelled from the Venetian Pre-Alps to the lagoons; herds were brought by the Morlachs from Herzegovina to the islands of Korčula and Mljet (Meleda). There are many examples of this phenomenon and involve all the Adriatic regions. A detailed census would show similar occurrences around the sea: transhumances, Alpine pasture, migration from the mountains to the coast, towards the cities. And each region of the Adriatic – upper, middle or lower – has its own connections and interconnections. In the upper Adriatic, a regional economy developed on the basis of the synergy of their individual segments from ancient times. Thus Istria, lacking cereals, exchanged its oil with the grain of the Friulan and Venetian plains. In this case, the lagoon was a zone of mediation, even regarding transport. Venice utilized all the resources available in the range of 100 kilometres: timber from Montello, Istria and Cadore; trachyte from the Euganean Hills, marble from the area around Verona, and white stone from Istria. It fed its population with wheat from the areas of Padua, Polesine and Treviso; with livestock from Dalmatia and Istria; fish from the lagoon and the open sea; and with wine from Friuli and Istria. Venice produced salt, but more often it dispatched salt from Istria, Dalmatia and Apulia to its hinterland. Venice flooded the entire Adriatic, the Pre-Alps, Carniola and Carinthia with its artisan products. In short, it was a regional economy driven by Venice
