The post-First World War era: New borderlands and a refugee crisis

In addition to the millions of fallen, more than eight million soldiers became prisoners of war during the First World War, over a million civilians became internees, and several millions were displaced from their homes, with many placed in securitized refugee camps. But the “long” First World War also produced 13 million war refugees, which speaks to the vast numbers of Europeans on the move in the years following the armistice (Ther Reference Ther2017, 57; Gatrell and Zhvanko Reference Gatrell and Zhvanko2017; Kowner and Rachamimov Reference Kowner and Rachamimov2022). New postwar border regions and refugee questions were connected. Francesca Rolandi (Reference Rolandi2022), for example, has shown how postwar refugees from the Italian region of Julian March (some of which had been part of the Austrian Littoral’s territory before the war) were integrated into Yugoslavia and became loyal supporters of the central government.

While the determination of some postwar borders required military engagement, some were resolved with a plebiscite, although not necessarily without violence. The latter is true for Carinthia, the former Austro-Hungarian crown land, where a plebiscite occurred in October 1920 to determine the border between Austria and Yugoslavia. The plebiscite, held in a predominantly Slovene-speaking area, ended unfavorably for the Yugoslavian state, provoking several thousand Slovenian-speaking Carinthians to leave for Yugoslavia (Grafenauer Reference Grafenauer, Štih and Balkovec2010, 477). The loss of territory disrupted the plans of the Provincial Government of Slovenia, which was engaged with the question of the settlement of war refugees. The national government, located in Ljubljana, sent a letter to all districts that “the issue of the possible settlement [of the refugees] is entering a more acute stage for Slovenia, especially since we lost Carinthia.”Footnote ⁴ In the letter, the government asked local headmen if there was any land available for purchase in their districts. Among the refugees in question were the inhabitants of the former Austrian Littoral, especially from the region between the cities of Trieste and Gorizia, which represented the western border of the Slovenian-speaking territory. Before the First World War, both cities had many inhabitants who spoke Slovenian — 35% in Trieste/Trst/Triest (which represented the largest Slovenian urban agglomeration) and 38% in Gorizia/Görz/Gorica — and the nearby countryside’s inhabitants predominantly spoke Slovenian (Fischer Reference Fischer and Fischer2005, 17).

The causes and course of the migration of the Slovenian-speaking Littorians during and after the First World War were multifaceted. In 1915, after Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, around 150,000 people living on the front line were forced to leave their homes. On the one hand, approximately 50,000 inhabitants, including 13,000 Slovenes, in the territory on the right side of the Isonzo/Soča river, which was occupied by the Italian army, were evacuated and taken into the Italian interior (Verginella Reference Verginella2015, 359; Bensa Reference Bensa2018, 34). Italian occupying authorities had very efficient organization of social care and support options, especially for the families of conscripts in the Austro-Hungarian army, which, according to Petra Svoljšak, was already part of the preparations of Italian authorities for the postwar annexation of the occupied borderland territories to the Kingdom of Italy (Svoljšak Reference Svoljšak and Golija2012, 8).

On the other hand, around 80,000 Slovenes from Littoral settled in Austria-Hungary, mainly in Carniola, Styria, Carinthia, Bohemian Lands, and Lower Austria, while only a few settled in Hungary (Svoljšak and Antoličič Reference Svoljšak and Antoličič2018, 282). State care for Austrian/Cislaitan war refugees was taken over by the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, which called on regional governments to accept refugees tolerantly. In Vienna, the Committee for Refugees from the Southern Parts of the Country [Hilfskomitte für Flüchtlinge aus dem Süden] was established, and in Ljubljana, the Agency for Refugees from the crownland of Gorizia-Gradisca [Posredovalnica za goriške begunce]. Their main task was to keep a census of refugees, find them housing and employment, and help raise funds in cooperation with organizations such as the Red Cross (Svoljšak and Antoličič Reference Svoljšak and Antoličič2018, 283; Verginella Reference Verginella2015, 359). The Agency for Refugees also had branches in some Slovenian towns that appealed to the residents to welcome refugees with open arms.

The attitudes of the locals in Carniola and Lower Styria towards refugees were often hostile. They were received as Lahi, a pejorative Slovene term for Italians, or Čiči (the traditional name for the people referring to the Vlachs and Istro-Romanians from the Istrian area of Ćićarija/Cicceria), as they were demeaningly called in Maribor/Marburg in Lower Styria. Usually, they were blamed for the scarcity and high cost of basic necessities, which were lacking owing to the economic crisis. August Štekar, who was born in 1909 near Gorizia/Gorica/Görz and moved with his family to the outskirts of Ljubljana/Leibach in 1915, remembered that the locals often angrily told him, “Damned Lahi, you are eating our bread!” (Cited in Prinčič Reference Prinčič1996, 274). Additionally, Littoral refugees who went to Lower Austria or Styria — mostly to refugee camps in Wagna bei Leibnitz, Bruck an der Leitha, Stenklamn, Zistersdorf, and Gmünd — were insulted by the locals, being called, at least at first, Italian dogs [italienische Hunde]. After the refugees told them that they were Slovenes and not Italians, they were called Slovene dogs [slowenische Hunde].Footnote ⁵ Refugees to the Czech Lands, including Kuttenberg/Kutná Hora in Bohemia, settled in private houses. Jože Jelen, born in 1931 in Prekmurje, remembered that his parents, who were Littoral refugees in the Czech Lands, lived well there: “They were hosted by the villages, where they helped the farmers and received payment for their work’ (Bensa Reference Bensa2018, 134).

After more than two years of war, with German help, the Austro-Hungarian army succeeded in breaking through the Italian front, which moved tens of kilometers all the way to the Piave River. This enabled refugees to return home. However, after the war, the border between Italy and Yugoslavia was fixed according to the London Agreement of 1915, when Italy joined the Entente side. The negotiations ended in November 1920 with the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo, in which the northeastern Adriatic border was determined. The territory of the former Austrian Littoral and the southwestern part of the former Carniola became part of the Italian Julian March province.

The violent politics of Italianization strongly affected the Croat- and Slovene-speaking populations (Bajc and Klabjan Reference Bajc and Klabjan2021). This provoked the largest refugee wave of Slovenes and Croats, with a total of 105,000, who left for Yugoslavia (Drnovšek Reference Drnovšek2012, 16–17; Downs Reference Downs2018; Rolandi Reference Rolandi2022). The economic hardship and oppressive political atmosphere created a steady flow of people from Julian March, especially civil servants — officials, industrial and railway workers, teachers, and cultural figures — who lost their jobs.

In her research on the Slovene press, Marta Verginella (Reference Verginella2015, 366) shows how, after the Italian occupation of the former Austrian Littoral, the Slovene public in central Slovenia became more welcoming towards Slovene refugees from Italy. However, the situation started becoming tense again after postwar refugees joined those who arrived during the war. According to the Office for Occupied Territories in Ljubljana, approximately 15,000 interwar Slovenian refugees remained in Yugoslavia (Svoljšak and Antoličič, Reference Svoljšak and Antoličič2018, 294), representing “an additional financial and administrative burden” (Strle Reference Strle and Verginella2013, 168). Problems in the integration and settling of Littoral refugees in the Slovene-speaking area of the new state also emerged due to the stereotypes: in the Slovene imaginary, “Trieste was a godless and destructive town that demographically and nationally extorted the hinterland. This stigma also clung to the people from Trieste who moved into central Slovenia between the two wars” (Verginella Reference Verginella2015, 369). By contrast, people from Trieste saw Ljubljana and other Slovenian towns as provincial, conservative, and clerical, where antifascism often appeared as too radical or barely comprehensible (ibid., 367–369).

Not just in Ljubljana and the former Carniola, but also in the former Lower Styria, immigrants from the Littoral had difficulties adapting to the new environment. After the postwar battles, Maribor became one of the most important towns in northern Yugoslavia. Several thousand refugees and migrants from Littoral came to the town. Especially when a large part of the Austrians left Maribor (and other parts of Lower Styria), the new migrants helped fill gaps in the economy and administration. With their strong Slovenian and pro-Yugoslav orientation, they also helped the Yugoslav authorities to nationalize the Mariborians (Potočnik Reference Potočnik2011, 67–68; Golouh Reference Golouh1935).

Nevertheless, the locals’ attitudes towards the refugees were not always welcoming. The Slovenian authorities asked the population to treat refugees kindly and fairly, while the local newspaper tried to explain why the Littoral refugees came to Styria (Potočnik Reference Potočnik2011, 67–68; Mariborski delavec 2010, 2). Despite efforts to better integrate the refugees, the following memories of children who came to Maribor as refugees can be found: “In Maribor, it was very difficult for us from the Littoral because we were insulted as ‘verdamten Čiči’ [damned Čiči]. Čič was an insult.”Footnote ⁶ By the 1930s, the sympathies for Germany grew in and around Maribor, and the enmity towards Slovenes from the Littoral flared up again. Furthermore, as noted by Mateja Ratej, in the wider Maribor area, adherence to Hitler’s ideology grew, which, however, did not include intolerance towards Jews; instead, especially after 1938, the hatred was directed towards the Serbs and the Littoral Slovenes (Čiči) (Ratej Reference Ratej2019, 38).

After the First World War, Littoral refugees began to return from camps in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Many had nowhere to return to and were accommodated in the former military camp at Strnišče near Ptuj, a town southeast of Maribor. During the war, several reserve military hospitals and camps for prisoners of war were built, with a capacity of 14,000 beds and 295 barracks. In October 1918, the Austrian military administration left the camp, which was taken over by the Social Policy Department of the National Government in Ljubljana (Bensa Reference Bensa2018, 35). In addition to refugees who spent the war in refugee camps, the government began sending Slovenian refugees from places occupied by Italy to the Strnišče camp. By the end of 1919, around 4,600 Littoral refugees were thought to have settled in the camp (Rojic Reference Rojic1984, 73; Kolar Reference Kolar and Kolar2010); according to Stanko Bensa (Reference Bensa2022, 13, 18–19), the numbers were even higher, up to 6,500.

Initially, the refugees received modest state support. The camp had a common canteen and school kitchen. Miro Turela, the son of a railroad worker, was a child of Trieste during the war. In 1919, his family decided to move to Yugoslavia and was accommodated in Strnišče. Turela remembered that “during the war, we spent hard time in Trieste with little food. Therefore, Strnišče made a pleasant change for me. … At school, we got cocoa and bread for lunch” (Cited in Rojic Reference Rojic1984, 74). While not clear from the sources, the mention of cocoa suggests support from humanitarian organizations, such as the American Relief Administration (ARA) in the Strnišče camp. In June 1919, the ARA started to help poor children in the Slovene part of Yugoslavia after some 2,000 railway cars of US flour arrived through Trieste (Šmidrkal and Stergar Reference Šmidrkal and Stergar2024, 247). In its nutritional guidelines, ARA recommended cocoa (American Relief Administration 1919; see also Hájková Reference Hájková2024).

Despite possible international help, refugee settlements were hardly a suitable living space. The Provincial Government for Slovenia recommended the industrialization of the refugee camp in Strnišče, which the local authorities refused. At the beginning of 1922, due to maintenance costs, the government decided to close the refugee camp, except for the school. At that time, there were 1,541 inhabitants in Strnišče, of whom 503 came from the Littoral and 303 were dependent on government support (ibid., 113). As the school kitchen was no longer in operation, the schoolchildren remained without lunch. An eight-year-old girl cried during the lesson, “I want to die so I won’t be hungry anymore” (ibid., 79). To improve this situation, the government extended the camp’s maintenance until the end of August 1922. In the spring of 1922, the agrarian office from Prekmurje visited the Littoral refugees in the camp and offered them the possibility of colonization and the acquisition of land as part of an agrarian reform (Bensa Reference Bensa2022, 13, 18–19). More than 200 Littoral refugees or forty-five families decided to go to the northeastern part of the country (Rojic Reference Rojic1984, 113; Šuligoj Reference Šuligoj and Kolar2010, 443).

Going to Slovenian Siberia

In the first few months after the armistices of 1918, Prekmurje/Muravidék became part of the short-lived First Hungarian Republic, which was preoccupied with the territorial demands of its neighboring countries. To keep the population in Prekmurje/Muravidék within the Hungarian state, the government tried to encourage their autonomous organization and established a government commissariat in Muraszombat/Sobota. The government commissioner appointed the Prekmurje/Muravidék native and social democrat Béla Obal. He described the situation in the region to the ministry as follows: “The Slovenian population lives in considerable neglect and misery, which is why the mood is bad and hopeless, but we can still turn it around in our interests. It is necessary to provide the most important necessities and food. This would have a positive effect on their mood and conditions” (Cited in Göncz Reference Göncz2021, 738). Obal reported the need for 100,000 tobacco packages, 100 tons of candles, 400 barrels of kerosene, 70 tons of sugar, large quantities of soap, shoe soles, and other necessities. His report was successful, as state officials contacted the Minister for Food, who took immediate action and called the sugar distribution service to “deliver sugar to the two counties densely populated with Slovenians” (ibid.). However, land distribution reform remained one of the most pressing problems in an overpopulated and distinctly agriculture-oriented region, where only a small proportion of the population had enough land to avoid having to leave for seasonal work or to emigrate. Indeed, the redistribution of land to the peasantry provoked turbulence throughout Europe, and the appeal of Bolshevism among peasants led the elites to implement land reform programs. In Prekmurje/Muravidék after March 1919, as part of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, farmers expected a resolution to the agrarian question by the new Soviet government. To this end, farmers participated en masse in the Hungarian elections of April 1919 (Lorenčič and Hozjan Reference Lorenčič and Hozjan2020, 686). Even before the elections, a small number of village Soviets in Prekmurje/Muravidék began to distribute large estate lands among farmers on their own initiative, but the central authorities reiterated that the distribution was premature. The postponement of agrarian reform caused discomfort and distrust of the new government among farmers. One of the officials of Prekmurje/Muravidék, Vilmos Tkálecz/Vilmoš Tkalec, took advantage of this situation. With profits from smuggling along the border with Austria, Tkálecz was able to finance the military and buy close colleagues’ loyalty. By supplying basic necessities, he also established and maintained minimal support from people around Muraszombat/Sobota. The army thus became increasingly loyal to him and not to Budapest, which escalated to the point that, at the end of May 1919, Tkálecz declared Prekmurje an independent republic, which was held out for a few days until it was successfully crushed by the Hungarian Red Army in early June 1919 (ibid., 688).

The Hungarian Soviet Republic had to deal with territorial disputes with neighboring countries while trying to reach an agreement over lifting the economic blockade — another form of war that had been introduced during the First World War (Mulder Reference Mulder2022). According to Surface and Bland (Reference Surface and Bland1931, 202), “the supplies contracted for Károlyi were delivered, to the extent of 114.7 tons of pork products and 204.4 tons of lard […]. No further deliveries were made, as the Supreme Council set up a blockade against Soviet Hungary.” The danger of the communist revolution represented a threat to the postwar domestic and international order. The victorious Entente defined the postwar order in their own terms and adopted Wilsonian principles as a blueprint for postwar peace (Newman Reference Newman, Pons and Smith2017, 99). At the Paris Peace Conference, the leaders of newborn countries crafted national mythologies to legitimize new states and territories (Orzoff Reference Orzoff2011). At first, the Yugoslav diplomats were not successful in persuading the great powers to grant them the territory of Prekmurje/Muravidék. This situation changed in July 1919 when Prekmurje/Muravidék was included in a package of territorial compensation promised to Yugoslavia in exchange for its participation in the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s military overthrow. In August 1919, Yugoslav military units occupied the territory of Prekmurje/Muravidék, the acquisition of which was confirmed in June 1920 by the signing of the Treaty of Trianon. As Jernej Kosi points out, “the legitimacy of the Yugoslav occupation of Prekmurje was grounded on the idea of the right to self-determination, despite ultimately being only a consequence of strategic considerations” (2020, 53).

In Ljubljana, the occupation of Prekmurje was reported as bearing “the greatest historical importance. This is the first time that we are united with brothers in blood from Hungary, who, for over 1,000 years, that is, since the arrival of the Slovenians in Pannonia, lived under foreign, hostile rule” (Domovina 1919, 1). Prekmurje was confessionally and linguistically a diverse region. In contrast to overwhelmingly Catholic central Slovenia, more than a quarter of Prekmurians were Protestants, somewhat less than one percent were Jews, and the rest were Catholics. On the eve of the First World War, in Prekmurje/Muravidék, “monolingual Slavophones,” according to Kosi, “represented the largest section of the population” (Kosi Reference Kosi2024, 285). Prekmurje was also home to Roma, who began settling in Prekmurje mainly from the interior of Hungary and Croatia in the early 19^th century and mostly spoke their mother tongue as well as Hungarian (Šperm Reference Šperm2010, 14–15). According to the first Yugoslav census of 1921, Prekmurje had 80.4 % of the population with Slovenian as their mother tongue, 15.2 % with Hungarian, and 0.7% with German. But if we zoom in on the Lendava area, the southern part of Prekmurje, where the refugees from Littoral received the land, the population census in 1910 shows that 90.4% of the population declared Hungarian as their mother tongue, 8.6% claimed Slovene, and the remaining percent said they spoke German or Croatian. The census carried out in 1921 indicates that in the Lendava area, Hungarian was the mother tongue of 82% of the inhabitants, while 16% spoke Slovene (Kovács Reference Kovács2007, 71–72).

According to Kosi, “members of Prekmurje’s Slovenian-speaking population predominantly identified themselves as ‘Sloveni’ or ‘Slovenci,’ yet they regarded the incoming Slovenian officials sent to the region as representatives of the new Yugoslav state as Carniolans, Slavs, or simply ‘newcomers.’ Prekmurje’s Slovenes did not think of the incoming Slovenes as belonging to the same ethnic group as them” (Kosi Reference Kosi2020, 63). The new Slovene administration thus began with the “slovenization” of Prekmurje according to their understanding of Slovenianness. Teachers “were expected not only to teach in the standard Slovene but also to make a significant contribution to the process of replacing the local understanding of ‘Sloveneness’ with the idea of being a member of the Slovene nation as it had been imagined by nationalists living in the former Cisleithanian territories” (Kosi Reference Kosi2018). Slovenization also took place at the associational level. Before 1918, Prekmurje had 22 voluntary fire departments, but 128 new departments were established before the beginning of the Second World War. The Yugoslav Firefighting Association in Ljubljana ensured that the language of command in the newly formed departments was Slovenian (Kladnik Reference Kladnik and Kladnik2020, 152). Most Slovenes rejected jobs in Prekmurje because of the negative stereotypes of being Slovenian Siberia, Strafkolonie, or the land of trachoma, the “Egyptian disease” (Novine 1922, 1; Kerec Reference Kerec2022). When Leopoldina Kos left Trieste in 1926 due to fascist violence and took a teaching position in Murska Sobota, it was, according to Marta Verginella, a shocking “jump from a vibrant urban environment, where she had been active in feminist circles (she advocated women’s right to vote), to a remote province.”

It was in this nationally and politically contested borderland that the Yugoslav/Slovene authorities — who had already lost territories in the west and north — relocated Littoral refugees from the Strnišče camp. They received land in the southeasternmost part of Prekmurje in Dolnja Lendava (now Lendava/Lendva), with a majority Hungarian-speaking population, which bordered Hungary on one side and the Međimurje region (now in Croatia) across the Mura River (figure 1). First, they built colonies of Petišovci, Benica, Pince, and Pince-Marof. The nationally and politically decisive Littoral refugees who settled in Prekmurje were aware of their role. In early 1923, in their letter to the Minister of Social Affairs in Belgrade, the Littoral refugees asked the minister to allow them to use the wood from the refugee camp barracks in Strnišče to build a shelter for their livestock, assuring him that they were “faithful guardians of the national and state border right next to the Hungarian border.”Footnote ⁷ Marija Peric, born in 1901 in Opatje Selo/ Opacchiasella, near Gorizia/Görz/Gorica, wrote in her diary that the refugees from the Littoral who settled in a colony in Prekmurje were “defenders and spreaders of Slovenian culture on the Hungarian border” (Bensa Reference Bensa2022, 122).

Figure 1. Provinces of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1920-1922).

1: Julian March Province; 2: Prekmurje; 3: Lendava district.

WikiEditor2004; Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

As state authorities tried to secure a new border with Hungary, the inner border between Slovene- and Croatian-speaking territories was still being contested. Until 1918, both Dolnja Lendava district and Međimurje were part of the Hungarian county of Zala. In Međimurje, many believed that this region belonged to Croatia; however, except for a short period in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not included in Croatia, except for the church authority (Göncz Reference Göncz2021, 733). After the turmoil at the end of the First World War, Međimurje became part of the “Croatian” provincial administration in Zagreb (Göncz Reference Göncz2021, 749/n 55; Jukopila Reference Jukopila2013, 59). In 1922, the central government in Belgrade divided the country into thirty-three administrative districts (oblast), according to which Prekmurje and Međimurje became part of the “Slovenian” Maribor Oblast (figure 2). In early 1924, the State Minister for Agrarian Reform approved the request for eight villages in Međimurje to be granted land in Murisa, Prekmurje, in the immediate vicinity of the new settlements of Littoral refugees.Footnote ⁸ According to the Minister, the Prekmurians who had already received land in Murisa should settle elsewhere.Footnote ⁹

Figure 2. Međimurje as part of the Maribor oblast (1922–1929).

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oblasts_of_the_Kingdom_of_Serbs,_Croats_and_Slovenes_-_Yugoslavia_(1922-1929).png; via Wikimedia Commons.

A few weeks later, the vice mayor of Maribor received a letter from the Prekmurje district authorities informing him that the Minister’s decision caused confusion and outrage among the population. While agrarian reform was “mainly about preventing the Hungarians from getting the land on lease … allocating the land near Murisa to the Međimurians … provoked stormy discontent among the Prekmurians.”Footnote ¹⁰ However, it was not only the Prekmurians’ discontent that worried about the authorities in Prekmurje. According to them, the supporters of Stjepan Radić, the Croatian politician and founder of the Croatian Peasant Party, “will greatly benefit from the fluctuation and inconsistency of the agrarian decrees. The Međimurians, who come from the other side of the Mura, will infuse the entire Spodnja Lendava with Radić’s ideas.” The author of the letter continued by referring to the eight Međimurian villages given permission to take the land in Prekmurje, that “the mentality is the same as that of the Prekmurians, which is a politically unoriented and uneducated element that sooner or later will want to accept Radić’s demagoguery. If people from Međimurje move to Prekmurje, then Radić’s party will probably gain significant strength.”Footnote ¹¹

Stjepan Radić’s Croatian Peasant Party (CPP), founded in 1904, became the strongest party in Croatia after 1918. After the 1920 elections, the political parties in Yugoslavia were mainly divided by questions around centralism, nationalism, and national unitarism. The Yugoslav Democratic Party and the National Radical Party became the leading parties, followed by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and the Croatian Peasant Party (CPP). After the state government banned the CPY, the CPP became the only serious challenger among the parties that distinctly addressed social (agrarian) issues. By the 1923 elections, the CPP convincingly took second place behind the Democratic Party.

In the 1920 elections, the CPP presented its lists only on the territory of Croatia and Slavonia. By 1923, the party started growing in Dalmatia, which CPP considered as Croatian land that needed to be united with the rest of Croatia, and by 1925, the party became the strongest one (Mirošević Reference Mirošević2000). Also, in Međimurje, from 1920 to 1927, peasants there were the most loyal voters of Stjepan Radić, who supported the agrarian reform within the framework of the republican system of government (Kolar-Dimitrijević Reference Kolar-Dimitrijevć2022). After June 1921, when the Yugoslav state became a constitutional monarchy and its Constitution enshrined centralism and unitarism, Radić decided to openly campaign in Slovenia, primarily in Prekmurje and along the Slovenian-Croatian border. He wanted to directly expand his electoral and political base and put pressure on the Slovenian People’s Party, the largest party in Slovenia, to radicalize its political struggle and join him in a common anti-centralist front (Prunk Reference Prunk1985, 26). However, in Slovenia, beyond the competition between political parties, the authorities wanted to terminate Radić’s activities. For example, when a representative of the CPP wanted to present its activities, a mayor in Prekmurje showed him the order of the district headship, in which it was written that the gendarmes must arrest all Radić’s agents if they appeared in Prekmurje and return them to Međimurje. Likewise, the entire population was forbidden from participating in any political meeting organized by the CPP (Prunk Reference Prunk1985, 25; Berberih-Slana Reference Berberih-Slana2005, 55–56).

In the 1920 elections in Prekmurje, the winning party by a large margin was the Slovenian People’s Party, followed by the local Prekmurian party (Domača Verstvena Stranka). In the 1923 elections in Spodnja Lendava, the Slovenian People’s Party won over 3,600 votes, followed by Radić’s CPP with almost 2,000 votes. The results for all other parties were significantly worse. In 1923, the number of voters in the Čentiba electoral district, which became home for the Littoral refugees, increased from 52 to 359. Radić’s candidate received most of the votes at 290, while Jožef Klekl, the well-known candidate of the Slovenian People’s Party, received only 32 votes. In the 1925 elections in Dolnja Lendava, the Slovenian People’s Party again celebrated a win, while the CPP came second again, with even more votes than two years earlier. In the Čentiba electoral district, the number of voters rose to 561. Of these voters, 432 opted for Radić and 76 for the Yugoslav Democratic Party, while Klekl finished only third, with 16 votes (Novine 1920a, 3; Novine 1923, 1; Novine 1925, 1). The success of the CPP was related to the difficult situation of farmers in Prekmurje and the implementation of agrarian reform. The following two sections of this article shed light on these developments.

“Every Serb, Croat, and Slovenian should be the master of their own land” vs. “A land to the tiller”

The “land question” was a problem not only in Prekmurje but throughout Europe. As a buffer against the spread of the Bolshevik revolution, Peter Gatrell has noted that the states redistributed land to the peasantry after recognizing they must “forestall peasant militancy rather than to wait for peasant anger to explode” (Gatrell Reference Gatrell and Horne2010, 5). In the context of central Europe, agrarian reform had not just social and economic but also national motivations (Müller Reference Müller2020; Dumitru Reference Dumitru2021). In regard to land distribution, the challenge of the countries that emerged after the First World War, which included territories of the former Habsburg or Ottoman Empire, was how to unify different systems of land evidencing, administration, and law codes (Siegrist and Müller Reference Siegrist, Müller, Siegriest and Müller”2015; Müller Reference Müller, Siegrist and Müller2015). Siegriest and Müller pointed out that while the countries in east central Europe during the interwar period were liberal, the concept of property enshrined in the constitutions was not liberal-individualistic but “ethno-national” (Siegrist and Müller Reference Siegrist, Müller, Siegriest and Müller”2015). This ethno-national protectionism was implemented by means of expropriation and land distribution quotas and, additionally, by means of colonization, which included soldiers, veterans, and war-disabled persons and their families.

In Yugoslavia, the agrarian problem was considered to be one of the most important issues facing the new state (Milošević Reference Milošević, Müller and Harre2010; Drakić Reference Drakić2014); however, as Milošević pointed out, the reform aimed to solve social and national problems more than to improve the agricultural production of the state. In terms of agrarian relations, Yugoslavia united very heterogeneous territories. In Serbia and part of Montenegro, the property structure was characterized mainly by small estates. In Dalmatia, coastal areas, and islands, the colonnade system from Venetian times was mainly preserved. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo and Sandžak, and part of Montenegro, before the agrarian reform, a number of farmers lived in feudal or semi-feudal relations. The areas that were once part of Austria-Hungary were characterized mainly by large estates and thus a higher number of propertyless hired workers. The majority of these large estates were owned by Hungarians or Germans. This was especially true for Prekmurje, where one could move from one end to the other, about 90 kilometers, without leaving the large estate’s land. According to data from 1921, out of eleven large landowners in Prekmurje, nine were Hungarian, and one each of German and Dutch (Kovács Reference Kovács2007, 69 and n 3).

In January 1919, Regent Alexander issued a Manifesto “to begin on a just solution to the agrarian issue, emphasizing the demand for abolishing serfdom and large land estates. The land should be distributed amongst poorer farmers, while the expropriated owners would receive proper compensation” (Milošević Reference Milošević, Müller and Harre2010, 48). The Interim Decree on the Preparation of the Agrarian Reform issued in February 1919 inaugurated the principle that “the land belongs to those who till it”; therefore, in order to be given land, one must work on the land oneself (Milošević Reference Milošević, Müller and Harre2010, 49). The social character of the agrarian reform was also evident because the Minister of Social Affairs was in charge of the agrarian reform until the Minister of Agrarian Reform took over in April 1919.

The regulations distinguished between different types of colonists. Already during the war, the Kingdom of Serbia announced that “each person who voluntarily enter the ranks of the Serbian army (…) will be given, after the war (…) enough arable land for settlement” (Milošević Reference Milošević, Müller and Harre2010, 48). After the war, the volunteers (those who fought for the unification of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes) represented a privileged category of settlers who had priority in the distribution of land and received the largest share (Drakić Reference Drakić2008, 171–273). In the next category were optants and refugees, who were given less land than the volunteers. The optants represented citizens of Yugoslavia, who, after the end of the war and border consolidation with the neighboring countries, decided to live in Yugoslavia. The optant colonists in Dolnja Lendava were mostly Slovenes, but some Croats also opted for Yugoslavia over Italy. The least amount of land was leased to local agrarian stakeholders, who were assigned land near their permanent residences. Those residents of Slovene and Međimurje settlements from around Dolnja Lendava, who were landless or had only a little land, acquired some land at the expense of agrarian reform, but not enough to support their families or produce for the market (Kovács Reference Kovács2007, 73–83).

The agrarian reform in Yugoslavia pursued twofold national objectives. First, it aimed to achieve national unification by trying to equalize the agrarian structure of the country (Milošević Reference Milošević, Müller and Harre2010, 54). The other aspect was colonization, where, according to the regent’s proclamation from January 1919, “every Serb, Croat and Slovene should be the master of their own land!” (Janša Reference Janša1964, 174). In the context of Croatia, for example, Kolar-Dimitrijević points out that with agrarian reform the state tried “to win the population over to the House of Karađorđević, so universal suffrage was granted to men over the age of 25, along with an effort to boycott Radić’s Croatian Republican Peasant Party” (Kolar-Dimitrijević Reference Kolar-Dimitrijević2014). According to Milošević, national unification also demanded colonization in order to mix Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Milošević Reference Milošević, Müller and Harre2010, 57).

In Prekmurje, the implementation of agrarian reform began in October 1919 (Kovács Reference Kovács2007, 70–71; Janša Reference Janša1964, 182). During his visit to Dolnja Lendava, the deputy director of the Agrarian Directorate in Ljubljana prepared a confidential report on the political situation in the area, which proposed expelling the Hungarian landowners in order for “the conscious Yugoslav elements to settle, the Slovene language to be fully established, and the Hungarians in Prekmurje to be controlled” (Kovács Reference Kovács2007, 76). Although the laws on agrarian reform did not contain discriminatory elements, national minorities in Yugoslavia were excluded from the distribution of agrarian lands. In Dolnja Lendava, the land was in the hands of the Esterházy family. When the Esterházy estate came under state control, Hungarian and German officials were replaced by people from other parts of Slovenia. In many cases, land was given to people without the necessary knowledge of how to cultivate it. The Assembly of Trustees (Zbor zaupnikov)Footnote ¹² for Prekmurje appealed to authorities:

In May 1920, the head of the Regional Agrarian Office in Prekmurje, together with the Agrarian Directorate in Ljubljana, approved the settlement of Littoral refugees on the land of Esterhazy’s estate, where most of the inhabitants were of Hungarian nationality. The first colonists, fourteen Littoral families, arrived in Dolnja Lendava in 1921 and, despite housing problems, diseases, and shortages, settled in Petišovci. Another group of Littoral refugees, coming from the Strnišče refugee camp, settled in Dolnja Lendava as well, especially in Benica. The third group of Littoral refugees who settled in Dolnja Lendava, especially in Pince, Dolga Vas, Zamostje, and the colony of Kamovci, were families who fled from violence in Italy. By 1931, five colonies had been established, with a population of almost 1,150 people (ibid., 85–89).

Figure 3. School in Benica, early 1920s.

Source: Bensa Reference Bensa2022, 102.

Through colonization, the state tried to create a reliable Slavic layer of the population along the Hungarian-Yugoslavian border in Dolnja Lendava while simultaneously loosening the dense network of Hungarian settlements. Needless to say, there was dissatisfaction among the Hungarians who, when they had the opportunity, tried to dominate the new arrivals. For example, the children of the colonists were attacked at the school in Zamostje and told that it was only for Hungarian children. The father of one of the children, colonist Izidor Pegan, stated in court, “When we were in the classroom, I heard the phrase ‘mars kuca.’ I understood this in the sense that we should go home [kuća in Croatian] and not in the sense of mars kutja, which means ‘go away, dogs’.” The colonist Ivana Kolenko similarly reported, “The children outside the school were shouting ‘mars kutja,’ meaning ‘go away, Slovenian dogs’.”

The Agrarian Office in Prekmurje noted that “after signing the Trianon Peace Treaty, interest in agrarian reform rose significantly.”Footnote ¹⁴ The implementation of agrarian reform revealed major social and national differences, as well as the fragile legitimacy of the new state. Right at the start of the agrarian reform, the Commission for Agrarian Reform in Prekmurje sent a letter to the Agrarian Directorate in Ljubljana complaining that “the agrarian reform provoked a crisis and divided Prekmurje into two camps: in one the poor, in the other the former large tenants. If there was a strong and strict government in our country, this would not happen, and … the nation would start respecting the laws and authorities. It is necessary to act with a firm hand.”Footnote ¹⁵

One of Prekmurje´s most prominent public figures, the Catholic priest and a delegate of the Slovenian People’s Party in the Belgrade Parliament, Jožef Klekl, warned that there was not enough land for locals and that they should have priority in the distribution based on the abysmal conditions in Prekmurje. At the two public meetings in January 1921 in Dolnja Lendava the aforementioned Assembly of Trustees warned that Prekmurje was facing “widespread social misery, overpopulation, lack of land, high unemployment, food crisis, extreme poverty, and fear of the worst famine” and emphasized that “the national and state feeling among the Prekmurians is no longer as deeply rooted as it was during the occupation of Prekmurje by the Yugoslav forces.”Footnote ¹⁶

In 1921, Klekl protested against the plan of the Minister for Agrarian Reform to settle Littoral refugees in Prekmurje (Bensa Reference Bensa2018, 47). Klekl’s main argument was that there was already insufficient land for the Prekmurians, who had to emigrate due to poverty. Such arguments have also been made by others. For example, as the civil commissioner for Prekmurje warned the Commission for Agriculture in Ljubljana, “The residents of Prekmurje were against the settlement of colonists because there was a lack of land for the natives. Newspapers have also joined the opposition.”Footnote ¹⁷ This was certainly true for the newspaper Novine, edited by Klekl, where readers could read statements such as, “Prekmurje is too densely populated. Should our people go to Albania or Macedonia? Settle the Littoralians there; they belong closer to Albania and Macedonia! Our people were born here and will stay here; just give them enough land.” (Novine 1920b, 1–2).

Figure 4. Colonists work in the fields in Benica.

Source: Bensa Reference Bensa2022, 124.

Figure 5. Flood in Benica.

Source: Bensa Reference Bensa2022, 96.

The greatest obstacle faced by refugees who received agricultural land was the repayment of loans and the inability to effectively cultivate the land because of the lack of tools, sowing material, and flooding. The inability to get out of poverty due to repayment of loans for land led Alojzij Krek, from the colony of Benica, to ask deputy Ljudevit Pivko, who was a member of the Yugoslav Democratic Party and dealt with economic issues that plagued Slovenian farmers, in 1925, “Why doesn’t the land belong to him who tills it?”Footnote ¹⁸ The family of Zdenka Barbarič, nee Pahor, came from Littoral and spent the First World War in Lower Austria. In 1921, they were among the first to be offered agricultural lands in Prekmurje. They acquired an apartment in the premises of the count’s estate and started farming and building their own homes. However, the value of the land had to be paid back to the agrarian and colonization cooperatives in Zagreb. They had no food or tools, and everything was missing (Bensa Reference Bensa2018, 141). Gašpar Marič, born in 1930 in the colony of Pince Marof, remembered that his parents left Istria in 1922. First, they were seasonal workers; before 1925, they received agricultural land in Prekmurje. After settling like other refugees in the counts’ stable, they built a modest home on the allotted plot. Farming was difficult, as they had no tools or utensils, but it was necessary to pay off the annuities for agricultural land. As there was no income, the father became a seasonal worker in France during the summer (ibid., 136).

Figure 6. Tambura orchestra in Benica after the flood.

Source: Bensa Reference Bensa2022, 152.

Just as the Assembly of Trustees for Prekmurje in January 1921 in Dolnja Lendava asserted that “we are and want to remain loyal citizens and sons of the free Yugoslav homeland” while simultaneously warning of the enormous social misery Prekmurje was facing, so too did the Littoral refugees claim that they were faithful guardians of the state while simultaneously warning that they had no wood to build their houses, no sowing supplies, not enough food, and so on. Taking the example of food supply, Rok Stergar investigated how it affected the popular legitimacy of Yugoslavia in the immediate post-First World War years (Stergar Reference Stergar2024; Šmidrkal and Stergar Reference Šmidrkal and Stergar2024). Focusing on Slovenia, Stergar found that postwar shortages turned people against the new state, but in the early 1920s, the food supply crisis slowly waned, and the overall situation stabilized. However, in the border regions, food played an important role in propaganda. Throughout 1919 and up to the referendum in October 1920, food supply was one of the central issues for the Yugoslav occupation in Southern Carinthia (ibid.). In Prekmurje, and especially in the refugee colonies, however, stabilization was not or was barely achieved in the interwar period. In 1929, the minister for agriculture sent a letter to the governor of the Drava Province (Slovenia), telling him that “the colonists are left to fend for themselves. Even their municipalities do not care about them’.”Footnote ¹⁹

On the one hand, the colonists helped each other and on the other hand they received help from various associations as well. Recent historiography has shed light on the complex and shifting relationship between voluntary associations and the state. Laura L. Downs has shown that after the First World War, the female voluntary welfare association Italia Redenta, which had close ties to the state and the army, took on a “civilizing mission,” by delivering emergency assistance to the surviving civilian population in the Julian March with an eye to winning their loyalty for Italy (Downs Reference Downs2018, 1088–1090, 1098–1099). Francesca Rolandi (Reference Rolandi2022), however, has looked at the postwar emigration from Julian March, especially Istria, to Yugoslavia in relation to the associations that supported the refugees upon their arrival. Organizations such as Jugoslav Matica or the Istra Education and Support Association soon obtained political support, particularly from pro-government parties that advocated Yugoslav unitarianism. The intertwining of associations with the state in support of refugees and integral Yugoslavism had not just social but also political consequences for how refugees were disciplined. For example, in Croatia, the centralist orientation of many Istrians aroused distrust, especially in areas where Croatian federalism was represented by the CPP (ibid., 47).

As for Prekmurje, there is hardly any information about the presence of the abovementioned organizations or about international relief organizations, such as the Red Cross or the American Relief Administration. The latter played a role in defeating the Hungarian Soviet Republic once the communist government was overthrown and the Allies lifted their food blockade and provided relief to Hungary (Adlgasser Reference Adlgasser, Bishof, Pelinka and Steininger1995; Kind-Kovács Reference Kind-Kovács2016; Cretu Reference Cretu2019). This help, however, did not reach Prekmurje, which at this time was occupied by the Yugoslav army. Welfare support offered by voluntary associations with Littoral refugees could hardly be found in the first years after Prekmurje became incorporated into Yugoslavia. Associational life in the Benica colony, for example, was isolated in the first years after the arrival of Littoral refugees. As the newcomers felt unwanted — even despised — as Sindi Časar (Reference Časar2018, 87) points out, they socialized primarily among themselves. By the mid-1920s, the colonies of Benica and Petišovci established singing and drama associations, as well as a tambura orchestra. They had their first theater performances at the end of the 1920s, as did the town of Lendava, where the locals “were speechless [at] what a beautiful performance these strange and faithless people staged’ (Bensa Reference Bensa2018, 102).

In addition to the social dimension, the associations established in the colonies had a national tone. In the colonies of Benica, Petišovci, and Dolga Vas, volunteer fire departments were established by the mid-1920s, which, as mentioned earlier, played a role in Slovenization. By the early 1930s, branches of the Sokol (Falcon) were established in Benica and Petišovci. As in many other countries of East Central Europe (Balikić et al. Reference Balikić, Newman and Pojar2023), Sokol was one of the largest association in interwar Yugoslavia and during the Royal dictatorship; it became a state institution designed to promote a liberal and secular ideology to foster “physically healthy, morally strong, and nationally conscious citizens of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia” (Troch Reference Troch2019; see also Pavlin and Čustonja Reference Pavlin and Čustonja2018).

Branches of the Saints Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood (which was founded in Ljubljana in 1885 as a school association and represented what Pieter M. Judson (Judson Reference Judson2006) characterized as a guardian of the nation) materially assisted schools and the population in Prekmurje throughout the interwar period. Its activity was particularly highlighted at Christmas when it donated to children and schools in the colonies (Časar Reference Časar2021, 26). Another association that helped Littorals in Prekmurje was Soča. It was founded in 1920 in Ljubljana as a gathering place for the Littorals in the town, but it also provided moral and material care. In 1932, two branches were established in Prekmurje with a plan to “unite all those who come from the occupied territory, offer mutual help, educate those around them about the Littoral and Adriatic problem, cultivate sociability and friendship among members, and inflame national aspirations.”Footnote ²⁰ Benica, Pince, and Petišovci colonies had a Soča branch that was active mainly during anniversaries and holidays. A special section was established with the task of collecting footwear and clothing for the poor (Časar, Reference Časar2018, 97–98). However, in the face of insufficient provisions from the state and associations, the greatest burden of provision was shouldered by the refugees, their families, and their communities. The aforementioned Zdenka Barbarič recalled that people helped each other frequently, while Lojze Voščun remembered that in Petišovci, after 1923, the first refugees began to build their homes as well as the local infrastructure by themselves (Bensa Reference Bensa2018, 134, 141).

Towards the next flight

What can this story about a group of refugees settling down in the border region of the new state of South Slav tell us about the post-First World War transition? In Prekmurje, home to a multilingual population that did not necessarily have national identifications, Wilson’s vision of national self-determination was not applied by the referendum; the region was occupied rather violently. The refugees, whom the new Yugoslav authorities wanted to settle on the border with Hungary, came from an area in which the postwar Italian authorities had embarked on a full-scale policy of Italianization and colonization. By comparison, while colonization in Slovenia was relatively light, 141 volunteers and 248 colonists received land, and most settled in Prekmurje. Did the Yugoslav/Slovenian colonization succeed? In 1921, 82% of the population in the Lendava region reported Hungarian as their mother tongue, 16% claimed Slovene, and 2% reported a different mother tongue. Ten years later, in 1931, only 39.6% of the population claimed Hungarian as their mother tongue, while 55.6% chose Slovenian, and 4.8% were classified as “other.” According to Attila, the choice of the mother tongue was largely influenced by the fact that the agrarian question was associated with the language of nation-building nations. It was due to this fact that, in the 1931 census, 3,000 to 4,000 people declared themselves Slovenes, who a decade earlier had stated that Hungarian was their mother tongue (Attila 2007, 86). Language fluidity and instrumental nationalism enabled interwar colonization to impact the Hungarian-Slovene language border and dissolve the compact chain of settlements with a Hungarian population in the Lendava region.

To achieve political stability, calm rural unrest, and prevent the Bolshevik revolution, Yugoslav authorities had to suppress the Croat Peasant Party and the Communist Party while meeting the demands of land reform. However, agrarian reform was not consistently carried out, and landowners were able to keep most of the land as soon as the social unrest that broke out after the First World War subsided. In Slovenia, agrarian reform did not achieve its purpose of halting the decline of small farmers who had received too little land. In Prekmurje, the level of debt was highest in Slovenia (Janša Reference Janša1964, 188; Čepič Reference Čepič1995, 29). Littoral refugees and their colonies were facing major problems in land cultivation. During colonization, there was no real cooperation between the authorities that implemented it, the colonists, and the estates, which resulted in considerable friction. This also affected the ability of refugees to have more control over their lives. It was within their families and communities that they could feel a sense of autonomy.

Did their plight improve over the years? In the second half of the 1930s, a group of Slovenian students organized camps, especially in the areas along the borders where Sloveneness was considered to be at risk. Their aim was to provide material and moral assistance to the population living there by distributing books, screening educational films, giving lectures, providing medical assistance, etc. The first camp was organized in 1935 in Šalovci in Northern Prekmurje. The choice of locale was not accidental, as they chose it according to their understanding of Prekmurje as the “Siberia of Slovenia” or “the most abandoned part of Slovenia” (Žaucer Reference Žaucer1987, 16). In 1939, the next two camps in Prekmurje were organized in the colonies of Kamovci and Petišovci. A report from the former stated that the inhabitants were completely distrustful of the Littoral colonists, while in the latter, it was reported that the situation was bad due to floods, drought, and mice, as well as attacks and a shooting by a village teacher. However, the worst situation was described in the colony of Benica, where a youth camp was held in 1940. The camp attendees wrote that the consequences of the state’s neglect of the colonist-populated landscape were visible. The Littoral refugees were still living in the same shacks they had brought from the Strnišče camp. In addition, there were frequent outbreaks of malaria and goiter, as well as problems with field mice (Časar Reference Časar2018, 107–114).

In 1935, the Slovenian administration visited the colonies of Littorals in Prekmurje. They found that the financial situation of at least 80% of colonists was such that their existence would be impossible without generous public assistance. Only those settlers who came to the colonies materially well off were able to endure, all others were naked, barefoot, and hungry. At the same time, the commission distinguished between two types of colonists: those who, despite their poverty, showed goodwill and tried to bring their finances into balance and those who had not gained anything through their own efforts. For the commission, these were idlers, vagrants, drunkards, etc., for whom the commission recommended removal from the colonies (ibid., 82–86). Vera Lacková reminded us that in the early 1940s, the authorities of the Slovakian State regarded the Roma, who traveled around the country to work, as vagrants and idlers (Lacková Reference Lacková, Mirga-Kruszelnicka and Dunajeva2020, 172; cf. Mihelič Reference Mihelič2024). It is not possible to understand from the sources whether the authorities in Slovenia equated the colonists with the Roma, but rather their labeling could be understood as an attempt to ethnically differentiate them.

After the arrival of the Germans in Prekmurje in April 1941, many in Murska Sobota welcomed them with enthusiasm, whereas in Lendava, the reception was colder, with Hungarian flags visibly displayed (Godina Reference Godina1980, 24–26). Shortly after the German army, the Hungarian army arrived in Prekmurje. For the Hungarian occupying administration, the most unreliable group of inhabitants was the Slovenes, who had settled in Prekmurje during the wars, including the Littoral colonists. Persecution began for all non-indigenous inhabitants, that is, those who had not or whose parents had not lived in the occupied territories before the end of October 1918. Hungary annulled the agrarian reform in Prekmurje, which meant that it removed the real estate acquired by the colonists as part of the Yugoslav agrarian reform. After unsuccessful negotiations with Italy regarding the extradition of colonists, the Hungarian authorities decided in June 1942 to intern colonists in the Sárvár/Šarvar concentration camp (Fujs Reference Fujs1997, 185). After the Second World War, the Littoralians returned to their devastated homes in socialist Yugoslavia, where the implementation of the agrarian reform was propagated with the slogan “The land to them who tills it.” For Littoralians, years of rebuilding homes and communities followed, as well as further emigration (Časar Reference Časar2021, 32).