Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- TRIPOLITANIA
- Fascist Air Race in the Cradle of Islam
- Lisa Anderson (1982): The Tripoli Republic Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (2011)
- EASTERN KARELIA
- National Romanticism and Brooding Woodland Pathos
- Eino Friberg (1989): Kalevale , English translation Hagar Olsson (1965)
- CARNARO AND FIUME
Richard K. Debo (1992): Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1918-1921 Boris Pasternak (1958): Doctor Zhivago Doctor Zhivago (1965): Script Boris Pasternak, directed by David Lean One of the kindest men I ever met BERTRAND RUSSELL, OF FOREIGN MINISTER IGNATIUS YOURIN
Fascist Air Race in the Cradle of Islam The air quivered. It was hot, improbably hot in fact. The young man was on his way to check the wind, rainfall, pressure and temperature readings at the little weather station rigged up on a hilltop beside the caravan station of Al Azizia on the Sahel Jeffare plateau. Far to the north he could see a glimpse of the blue strip of the Mediterranean, interrupted only by the minarets in the capital of Tripoli. And a little nearer lay the almost unnaturally sharp divide between the bright green agricultural areas out there and the bone-dry, yellow-brown desert in which he stood. Off to the west, it rose in abrupt drifts, before gradually evening out into an endless rocky grey plain that led towards the mountain chain in the south. This was where the Ghibli wind came from, an incessant föhn or southerly wind that just made everything even hotter. He couldn’t even sweat as he clambered up the last few steps to the wooden box containing the instruments and struggled to note the temperature: 57.8 degrees. That was a lot. But he hadn’t the faintest idea that he had just measured the highest temperature ever recorded on the earth’s surface. It was 13 September in the Republic of Tripoli. The Republic of Tripoli, or Al-Jumhuriya al-Trabulsiya, had declared its independence from Italy in November 1918 and was the first ever Arab republic. The initiative came from the city-dwellers of Tripoli, who had been promised independence after Italy captured the area from the Turkish Ottomans in 1911. Instead, the whole region had ended up as an Italian colony. While Italy was licking its wounds after the First World War, they seized their opportunity. The aim was a secular state that would unite the population of Arabs, Berbers and Tuaregs, with their differing social systems and different denominations of Islam.168 A deputation was sent to the peace conference in Paris in 1919 to seek international recognition. The conference was taking place at the Chateau de Versailles. The delegation from Tripoli was not allowed into the negotiations themselves, but stood waiting in the gilt colonnades whenever the delegates took a break. However, they were given the cold shoulder. The thirty-two participating countries had more important things on their mind. What’s more, no oil had been found in the area, unlike other Arab countries in the east. The deputation returned home, disappointed. In the meantime, Italy had adopted a tougher tone. It flooded the area with leaflets dropped by plane, threatening a massive invasion if the independence efforts were not shelved. Nothing comes of the invasion, but the leaders of the Republic of Tripoli agree that Italy will be consulted when the final constitution is written in June 1919. So there is never really any question of full independence. But the newly established republic does gain some concessions: that the Arabic language will be on an equal footing with Italian, as well as some points related to civil rights and freedom of the press. And they get a parliament elected by a popular vote of sorts.
The Tripoli Republic is ill equipped in military terms. And once the Italians have successfully used divide-and-rule tactics on the various tribes, it abandons all resistance.169 The colony is given the name of Tripolitania and Italian settlers quickly take possession of the fertile coastal areas while the local population is driven further inland. The few who take the risk of staying must commit themselves to working free of charge on whatever roads and other infrastructure projects the Italians might come up with. The Italian troops face bigger problems in Cyrenaica, particularly with a large group of combative, well-armed Muslim militias. They see Islam, nationalism and anti-colonialism as three sides of the same issue.170 The Italians intern more than a hundred thousand prisoners in concentration camps. There are constant massacres, which even involve the use of chemical weapons.
In letters to the old country, people talk about life as a master race with the locals taking care of all the dirty work. They complain about the heat, but boast about the newly built racetrack, with its annual international motor-racing competition. And if the letter is from a man in the expanding upper class, it may well talk about the flying club, L’Aereo Club della Tripolitania. It is extremely active and in summer 1934, two stamps are issued to mark the Circuito delle Oasi, the Oasis Circuit, an international air race along the outer borders of Tripolitania. The race starts at the seaplane base in Tripoli harbour. We can imagine the atmosphere: redolent of perfume, newly tanned leather and oil fumes, with learned discussions about engine performance. Some of the first planes are forced to return after trouble with the Ghibli wind over the mountains. After three intermediate landings, the others return to a champagne reception on the jetty outside the Uadden hotel. My stamp comes equipped with its own special postmark celebrating the air race. It is placed with flawless precision. The postal worker must have leaned back in his chair with a self-satisfied air afterwards. We can guess that he loved flying machines, a love bordering on the ideological that he shared with most fascists. [1934: Trade fair in Tripoli: special issue in connection with the Oasis Circuit air race.] On 3 December 1934, Tripolitania was merged with Cyrenaica and Fezzan to become Italian Libya. During the Second World War, the Italians lost the entire colony to the Allies. The part that included Tripolitania remained under British administration until Libya was declared an independent kingdom on 24 December 1951. Tripolitania operated as a separate province until 1963, when the whole thing was replaced with a system of smaller administrative regions. During the civil war in 2011, Muammar Gaddafi was bombed out of power by the same countries that refused to recognise the Tripoli Republic in 1918 – with the addition of Norway. Some years earlier, the heat record from Al Azizia had already been overturned by leading meteorological researchers. They said that 57.8 degrees could not possibly be right,172 and claimed the boy who read the record temperature must have been badly trained. Possibly, the usually precise Bellani Six Thermometer was also poorly calibrated. As a result, the USA took the lead, with a temperature of 56.7 degrees in Death Valley in California in 2012. Lisa Anderson (1982): The Tripoli Republic Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (2011): Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization and Resistance. We have also brought under our government a population that we must care for and steer towards a more civilized way of life PIETRO BODOGLIO, ITALIAN GOVERNOR
National Romanticism and Brooding Woodland Pathos The stamp from Eastern Karelia shows a raging bear beneath a sky sparkling with Northern Lights. It has cast off its chains and is ready to fight. The motif was produced by artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, otherwise known for his illustrations of Finland’s national epic poem Kalevala – more or less the equivalent of Norway’s Poetic Edda. Kalevala is based on material collected in Eastern Karelia; the first part is a creation story in which a teal comes flying across the taiga: ‘The beautiful bird came gliding over the water and caught sight of the maiden’s kneecap in the bluish billows; it thought it was a hillock, took it for lush turf.’173 Akseli Gallen-Kallela was a cosmopolitan who had been educated in Paris, where he was greatly inspired by symbolism and Art Nouveau. He had a joint exhibition with Edvard Munch in Berlin and later took long study trips to Kenya and Mexico. At the same time, he was a sworn nationalist, with strongly romantic inclinations. Along with fellow artists such as the architect Eliel Saarinen and the composer Jean Sibelius, he formed the Karelianists. They believed they had found the very cradle of Finnish culture in Eastern Karelia, an archaic, landscape of lakes and acidic turf bog densely interwoven with Norway spruce, fir and birch trees; and on scattered clearings, small silver-grey farmsteads inhabited by desiccated men and wiry-haired women. A slash-and-burn farming technique called huuhta (which means spruce tree) was developed to perfection here over several thousand years, and farmers continued to use it well into the 1900s. The principle was simple: spruce trees were cut down and dried out over the winter before being burnt on the same spot. Then, rye or turnips were planted in the ashes, usually in two rotations, after which the soil was exhausted but still rich enough in nutrients to use as sheep pastures or meadows until new woodland had grown. But slash-and-burn farming required large areas of land, so it goes without saying that the farms had to be widely dispersed. This not only cultivated eccentric personalities but also meant everybody needed to have their own drying kiln for the rye. Along with the chimneyless main house and the sauna, this resulted in the farm buildings being organized in a somewhat less orderly fashion than on farmsteads elsewhere in Scandinavia. And because of the unlimited access to wood, people kept the fires going intensively, everywhere, all the time. In the resulting scenery, shrouded in turn by smoke and frost, the Karelianists found an ancestral atmosphere that appeared, on the outside, to be authentic and unsullied by any other culture. Finland is basically a young country. For seven hundred years, the Finnish peninsula was ruled by Sweden, until it was conquered by Tsar Alexander I of Russia in 1808 and became a Russian dependency with the slightly misleading name of the Grand Duchy of Finland. Once the Bolsheviks had overthrown the old rulers in the Russian revolution of 1917, the Finns believed the conditions for their previously close relationship with Russia no longer applied. They declared Finnish independence on 6 December of the same year, a move that was accepted by the newly formed Soviet regime. And new borders were agreed in Tartu in 1920. But in the process, large Finnish-speaking areas in Eastern Karelia were left on the Soviet side. The population felt betrayed and rebelled. Five hundred Finnish volunteers joined their fight, many of whom dreamt of a Greater Finland that would also include parts of northern Sweden and Finnmark – like a miniature version of the Nazis’ visions of a Greater Germany some years later. The rebels quickly set to work, systematically purging everybody who could be suspected of Soviet sympathies. At the same time, they worked intensively to secure official support from Finland. Their overtures were rejected by the Finnish government. In despair, one of the leaders, the 21-year-old philosophy student Bobi Sivén, committed suicide. He wrote a suicide letter dripping with pathos to the Finnish foreign minister Rudolf Holsti, which was later described as ‘the most overblown letter ever sent’.174 Sivén shoots himself in the heart rather than the head, a symbolic act that places him in the same class as many other Finnish heroes, for whom aesthetic concerns remain crucial even in death.
But a major Soviet offensive early in January quickly changes things. The Karelian rebels are suffering from lack of food and frostbite, and at the beginning of February the resistance falls apart. The rebels panic and quickly retreat towards the Finnish border. And it is only now that the stamps with the raging bear come into circulation. In practice, they are only valid for a couple of snowy winter weeks: from 31 January to 16 February 1922. My stamp is postmarked Uhtua, a village on the shore of Lake Kuittijärvet176, which was already lost by 6 February. The postmaster going through the letters must certainly have been made nervous by the distant but identifiable crackle of machine-gun fire, the sharp cries of command in the street outside, the echo of hobnailed boots on icy roads. Yet the postmark is steady and neat, which doesn’t make sense, so I’m inclined to believe it is one of the many forgeries, even if the stamp itself is genuine enough. The conflict ended with a treaty between the Soviet Union and Finland a bit later in the spring, whereby Karelia was even granted a degree of autonomy, as the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. For a period, those who wished were offered safe conduct to Finland, an opportunity some 30,000 Karelians seized. In the early years, instruction in Finnish was permitted in the schools. But the reins were quickly tightened and by the mid-1930s, it was a regular Soviet republic. [1922: Coat of arms with a raging bear] Eastern Karelia was recaptured in the Second World War, once again driven by ambitions of a Greater Finland. But now the Finnish state was behind the plan itself, with strong support from Germany. The invasion was part of Operation Barbarossa, in which Hitler’s primary aim was to conquer the Soviet Union across the whole of the line stretching from Kola to Crimea, and Finland held a substantial part of Eastern Karelia from 1941 until the evacuation in 1944. Today the territory is a part of Karelia, one of Russia’s twenty-one federal republics. It stretches from the White Sea in the north to Lakes Ladoga and Onega in the southeast, and its most important industries are forestry and wood processing. After perestroika at the end of the 1980s, a certain cultural softening becomes evident, including a suggestion that Finnish could be permitted as a second language in the schools. But the megalomaniac Greater Finns are gone, and Karelianism is dead forever. That said, is there a hint of Bobi Sivén’s spirit to be found in the True Finns party formed in Helsinki in 1995? Eino Friberg (1989): Kalevale, English translation Hagar Olsson (1965) The Woodcarver and Death: A Tale from Karelia Jean Sibelius (1892/94) Karelia Suite Opus 11 The most overblown letter ever sent RUDOLF HOLSTI, OF THE LETTER FROM NATIONALIST BOBI SIVÉN
Poetry and Fascism Few places offer such stark contrasts in climate as the barren, south-facing slopes in the heart of the Adriatic. Even when bathing temperatures along the coast are more than acceptable, there’s still plenty of snow in the mountains ten kilometres inland. And throughout the winter half of the year, the unpredictable Bora wind can strike, arriving without warning from the northeast, gusting at speeds of more than 30 m per second. For the Romans, this was crucial to their planning of the coastal town of Rijeka two thousand years ago: they consistently placed the main roads at right angles to the main wind direction. The buildings were also constructed in robust natural stone masonry, a building style that was maintained in all subsequent modernizations right up until the 1900s. The same principles were applied in the villages to the north along the cliffy coasts and further inland in the narrow wooded valleys. In the 1920s, Rijeka was the centre of a small autonomous state, which adopted the Italian name of Fiume, with a three-month interlude in autumn 1920 as Carnaro. The population in the area was predominantly Italian, with a minority of Croatians and Hungarians. Everyday conversations took place in Italian, interspersed with a few Croatian words. Fiume had already been a free state for a period in the 1700s. Later, it switched to a more limited autonomous status, known as corpus separatum, within the kingdom of Hungary. This was maintained until Hungary and Austria merged in 1867. The big argument only started during the settlements that followed the First World War. Austria-Hungary had suffered a resounding loss, and the victorious great powers envisaged a buffer state at the innermost end of the Adriatic. This was in direct opposition to the wishes of both the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), both of which had territorial rights in the area. But the great powers stood their ground. Fiume would be established and organized as a free state. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, went even further, seeing the free state as a future base for the League of Nations, with supranational institutions for the promotion of disarmament and peace. But the argument continued, and internal conflicts between the different ethnic groups became ever more frequent. British, American and French troops were sent in to cool tempers and take control. This is how the situation stands when the ageing Italian poet, the Prince of Montenevoso, best known as Gabriele D’Annunzio, steps in. Born in 1863, he grows up in the secure environment of a landowning family in Pescara, a little coastal town further along the Adriatic coast. He writes his first poetry collection, Primo Vere, when he is only sixteen. He soon joins the decadents in Paris and over the years, he produces an abundant stream of poems, novels and plays whose common feature is that they are passionate to the point of being overheated. When not writing, D’Annunzio indulges wholeheartedly in the pleasures of life, leading a notoriously debauched existence that involves experiments with drugs and eroticism, all of it neatly logged in his diary. He also develops some sympathy with the futurist movement that emerges in Italy at the beginning of the 1900s. The Futurist manifesto takes a forward-looking stance, adopting speed and technology as its central themes. D’Annunzio loves planes, torpedoes, machine-guns and fast cars. Most of his literary work is already on the shelves by 1910, when he enters political life; here, he is similarly temperamental, as evidenced by his continual swings between right and left wing. However, things settle down during the First World War when he is quick to advocate Italy’s involvement in support of the French, in a ‘Latin war against the Germanic barbarians’. And he signs up immediately when Italy eventually goes to war on the side of the Allies. It is said that D’Annunzio was named Gabriele because he looked so angelic as a child. Something of that impression remains intact in photographs taken after the end of the war, although he also has a severely receding hairline and something about his eyes betrays a passion beyond any normal emotional life. In addition, he is fairly short, although not quite as short as his hero Napoleon. The war has convinced him of the superiority of nationalism. He joins the Irredentists, who want to unite all the areas with Italian-speaking inhabitants into one huge Italian state. This is where Fiume belongs, its population of 60,000 dominated by a majority of 40,000 Italians. He declares that Fiume will become part of Italy, whatever the cost: ‘Fiume or death’ – ‘O fiume o la morte’.177 On 12 September 1919, D’Annunzio enters Fiume at the head of an irregular army of 2,600 enraged and single-minded Italian nationalists, many with combat experience from the world war. They force the Allied occupation forces to beat a retreat, and are given a hero’s welcome by the local Italian population. The occupation lasts fifteen months. D’Annunzio repeatedly attempts to get Italy to officially recognize and support his project, but to no avail. Instead the authorities in Rome ask him to surrender, and threaten him with a blockade. The president Francesco Nitti declares that after losing half a million citizens in the First World War, Italy cannot be lost through the folly of romantic and literary fops.178 Unsurprisingly, D’Annunzio responded in September 1920 by declaring the establishment of the Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro, the Italian Government of Carnaro, named after the nearby Gulf of Canaro. With his feeling for form and ornamentation, he sets to work at once designing a flag, which bears a snake biting its own tail above the inscription: Quis contra nos: Who can oppose us. The fledgling state organizes itself using a model that will later be taken up by Italian fascism, with D’Annunzio as Il Duce, the leader. It has several surprising features, including full suffrage for women and music as a cornerstone for both the exercise of power and cultural education. In every district, a choir and orchestra is to be established with public funds, and D’Annunzio sets to work planning a concert hall to seat ten thousand, with free entry. [1920: Issue to mark the anniversary of D’Annunzio’s march into Fiume. The stamp was overprinted following the occupation of the islands of Arbe and Veglia.] The well-designed stamps being printed in large quantities are intended to be a significant source of income for the new state. The motifs include a portrait of D’Annunzio himself, and they are distributed to collectors worldwide.179 After the official establishment of Carnaro in September 1920, they are overprinted with the text: Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro. My stamp, with a dagger and rope, belongs to this group, and it leaves one in little doubt about its message. At this time, D’Annunzio launches the idea of the March on Rome, which will contribute to an eventual revolution. Many Italians sympathize with him and whole ships’ crews in the Italian navy sign up as volunteers. Soon, Carnaro has an army of four thousand well-trained soldiers. But this is still not enough to repel the surprise attack by superior Italian troops at Christmas in 1920. D’Annunzio himself flees north by motorcycle on 29 December after the Italian cruiser, Andrea Doria, has subjected the city to heavy bombardment. And so the Free State of Fiume, Stato Libero di Fiume, at last becomes a reality. It had already been agreed on paper under the Treaty of Rapallo a couple of months earlier. The agreement implied that all disagreements between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes would be set aside. The land area, a modest 28 km2, would include a corridor along the coast in the west, linking the new state to Italy. In line with the wishes of the USA and the great powers of Europe, the state acquired full sovereignty. And in return it quickly gained international recognition. In the spring of 1921, parliamentary elections were held in the free state. This ended in a clear victory for the Autonomists, who favoured independence, although the Italian nationalists had tried their luck again. Old stamps were destroyed and new ones were printed, generally a little less melodramatic than their predecessors. My stamp, from 1922, shows a Venetian galley overprinted with Constituenta Fiume, to demonstrate that this was now a serious country with its own constitution. But the stability was only illusory: there were constant disturbances and repeated coup attempts – put down each time by Italian troops.
It ends in a coup, with Mussolini seizing the role of Il Duce. He immediately adopts many of the rituals and expressions used during D’Annunzio’s time in Fiume, such as the use of black shirts, the well-choreographed parades and the emotive balcony speeches, complete with almost excessive gesticulation. D’Annunzio is angry. He feels passed over. What’s more, he has a lot of reservations about the Fascist politics Mussolini is introducing. This irritates Mussolini. ‘When your tooth is rotten you have two possibilities: pull it out or fill it with gold. I’ve chosen the latter for D’Annunzio.’180 D’Annunzio has medals and honours heaped upon him until he dies of a stroke in 1938. He is interred at the state’s expense and is buried standing up in a niche at his home by Lake Garda, in accordance with his own wishes. After the fascists took over in Italy, the Fiume question gained traction. Under heavy pressure from the Italians, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes signed the Treaty of Rome at the end of January 1924, in which the free state was dissolved and divided up. Italy got most of it, while the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was left with the unappealing urban district of Sušak in the east. The whole thing was done without recourse to the elected government in Fiume, which went into exile. The British writer Rebecca West, travelling through the area just before the Second World War, describes a dismal encounter. There we found a town that has the quality of a dream, a bad headachy dream. Its original character is round and sunburnt and solid, like any pompous southern port, but it has been hacked by treaties into a surrealist form.181 After Italy capitulated in 1945, the rest of the old government in exile returned home after more than twenty years abroad. Their desire to take matters in hand again was brutally rebuffed by the Yugoslavian authorities, which had now captured the city. Many of the aged Autonomists were killed, without attracting much attention. And after the peace treaty in Paris in 1947, Fiume was officially incorporated into Yugoslavia under the new name of Rijeka. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, Rijeka became Croatia’s most important port, and still is to this day. And D’Annunzio has been rehabilitated as one of Italy’s greatest poets. [1922: Overprint on a stamp from 1919, showing a Venetian galley. It marks the constitution of a new parliament.] Yüklə 463,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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