Author: Sabrina Žigo
Publisher: City Museum of Rijeka, 2020
Language: Croatian with English summary
Format: 28 x 23 cm, paperback, illustrations, 90 pages
The book is dedicated to the unification of Rijeka and Sušak after the Second World War. The book follows the sequence of events from the time when Rijeka was transformed from an imperial Austro-Hungarian port into a provincial Italian city and, symbolically, to the post-war establishment of the Rijeka and Sušak City Physical Education Committee as the first joint institution of the then two cities. The book is richly illustrated with documentary material about the removal of the state border between Italy and Yugoslavia, which painfully divided the city into two parts between the two wars. It did just as much as the wall erected between the two parts of Berlin did after the Second World War. The border disappeared after the difficult battle for Rijeka, when the city was annexed to Yugoslavia, which also meant Croatia, via diplomatic means by the Peace Treaty concluded in Paris in 1947 two years after the end of the war. This enabled the administrative unification of Sušak and Rijeka into one city under international law, which happened in February 1948. The subtitle of the book does not refer symbolically solely to the specific border on the Rječina, in a broader sense it points to the layering of the accompanying events behind which stood the imperial interest in reaching for someone else’s territory.
