Authors

Maciej Czerwinski ¹;  ¹ Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland

Discussion

In the presentation, a mental map of Dalmatia, imagined as the crossroads of the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and Central Europe, will be analyzed. I will focus on the autobiographical accounts of Enzo Bettiza, published in 1996 in Italian (as Esilio), and immediately translated into Croatian. Bettiza, born to a Split bourgeois family in 1927, grew up in Dalmatia, but in 1945 fled to Italy. His native Dalmatia is in his writings imaginatively located at the crossroads of various civilisations, but with a strong sense of belonging to the Western cultural pattern. The book, contested by some Croatian critiques (and even believed to express colonial attitudes) brought to life some disputable problems concerning the Dalmatian borderlands and a disputable relationship to its heritage, in particular regarding the Croatian and Italian dominant discourses. The discussion of Dalmatia as a borderland area is important because it is, at least in most scholarship trends, overshadowed by the dominance of the Balkanist discourse. In Croatian culture, Dalmatia, in particular its littoral part, is conceptualized as a heart of the Mediterranean culture, a proof of Croatian Western provenance (contesting, at the same time, its Balkan belonging), whereas in the Italian dominant discourse, it is deemed peripherical but important in the politics of memory (in particular recently, when the politic of memory of the so-called esuli is in the mainstream