This article links two borderlands: the Italo-Slovene and the Slovene-Hungarian in the aftermath of the First World War. It focuses on the wartime refugees from the hinterlands of Trieste who, in accordance with agrarian reform, which the Yugoslav state began in 1919, were settled as colonists on the new Hungarian-South Slav border in the early 1920s. By using memoir literature and “ego documents,” the article tackles several aspects, including the refugee experience and social assistance during the First World War, the political motivation of the land reform, and the lived experiences of the colonists. In Yugoslavia, the agrarian problem was considered to be one of the most important issues facing the new state. The land reform aimed to solve social and national problems more than to improve the agricultural production of the state. In the example of the Prekmurje region, this article aims to show that interwar colonization succeeded in impacting the Hungarian–Slovene language border but failed miserably to ensure social transformation and security for the impoverished population.
