Od Italije do Male Italije – talijanske oaze u zapadnoj Slavoniji
From Italy to Little Italy — Italian Enclaves in Western Slavonia

Summary/Abstract: Very few people know that in western Slavonia there is a small Italian enclave, a little island of several villages, that has existed for more than 100 years. These Italians, unlike their co-nationals - a well known Italian minority in Mediterranean Croatia, have extended further inland into the Croatian soil. In this article the author has recorded her own field-work research in the villages of western Slavonia where the Italian minority live - Ploština, Kapetanovo polje, Obrijež and Veliki Banovac and in what is known as Little Italy in Zagreb. She has tried to provide an answer to such questions as - who are the Italians of western Slavonia, what has been their fate during the last hundred or so years, how did they get to where they now live, what is their own feeling about their national identity and finally what is the effect of the Homeland war on the Italian villages of western Slavonia and in what extent the present picture is a mirror and a part of destroyed traditional culture of this region. Special attention is paid to discovery of signs which might mark or have marked this Italian enclave as having a different ethnic identity from that of the surrounding Croatian ethnos or those of the other nearby minorities. The author analyses an apparently unimportant "sign" - a horse meat sausage - which she considers to be one such basic sign of identity that was built during the historical process in the places of settlement.

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