Free Territory of Trieste

A country invented by treaty to solve an argument, which never worked and was quietly divided nine years later. Trieste had been Austria's only major port, a cosmopolitan Habsburg city of Italians, Slovenes, Germans, Greeks and a substantial Jewish community, and its transfer to Italy in 1920 cut it off from the hinterland that gave it purpose. Yugoslav forces took the city in May 1945 and were pushed back by the Allies after forty days, during which several thousand people disappeared into the foibe, the karst sinkholes. Because neither Italy nor Yugoslavia could be given the city without a crisis, the 1947 peace treaty created a Free Territory under United Nations Security Council protection, with a governor the Council was to appoint. It never appointed one. The territory was administered instead in two zones: Zone A around the city by British and American troops, Zone B by Yugoslavia, each running its own currency, police and schools. The London Memorandum of 1954 handed Zone A to Italy and Zone B to Yugoslavia in what was described as a temporary administrative arrangement, and the Treaty of Osimo made it permanent in 1975. Around two hundred and fifty thousand Italians left the Yugoslav zone and Istria. Trieste's free port status survives from the arrangement. The territory covered about seven hundred and thirty square kilometres. Its provisional stamps and currency are collectors' items. Zone A held Trieste itself and Zone B the Istrian coast south of it. The demonstrations of November 1953 in Trieste left six dead and preceded the handover by months.

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