Property as Metaphor: Home and Belonging in Goran Vojnović’s Film Piran – Pirano (Slovenia, 2010)

Abstract

In this chapter, the author analyzes property in the film Piran – Pirano (Slovenia, 2010), directed by Goran Vojnović. The film is set in the Istrian town of Piran (It. Pirano) in today’s Slovenia. Its property metaphors encapsulate the historical experience of individuals who lived through the war’s aftermath, through displacement and the rifts between those who “vanished,” those who stayed, those who moved in from elsewhere, and those who—eventually—returned. Real estate is at the metaphorical center stage: an apartment in the town’s center which passes from an Italian family to a Slovene-Bosnian one. Looking from there, the author addresses further metaphorical devices of property: a piano, the town of Piran, the languages spoken (Slovene, Bosnian, Italian), and family graves. Through its cinematic approach, the chapter illustrates biographical experiences of voids—and who (potentially) filled them—in Piran and the Istrian peninsula.

Introduction

“On 10 December 1955 I saw Anica again, and I was reborn … oh, dear Antonio, it is not only you that was born in Piran. Piran … is also my birthplace.” These words are spoken by Veljko, an old man in his 80s, to Antonio, approximately the same age, in a key scene in the 2010 film Piran – Pirano, the directorial debut of the acclaimed Slovene writer Goran Vojnović. The film’s central questions are: Who can claim property in Piran, the tiny coastal town in northwestern Istria, in today’s Slovenia, and who can claim that the town itself belongs to them? And how are these inclusive rather than exclusive questions?¹

In this chapter, I analyze how an apartment in Piran’s historic city center serves as a cinematic plot device to make a statement about complex property issues in the Istrian peninsula. The film is not a legal drama about a returnee’s attempts to get his house back. Rather, it is a drama about belonging to a place to which one cannot truly return. Consequently, property is understood here as going beyond its mere materiality: I analyze property as embedded in social relationships and practices, which are interrelated and which transform over time, thereby (re)defining what property is. The film Piran – Pirano uses as an artistic device the interplay between the still nature of material property (an apartment) and the turmoil, destruction, and reconstruction that surround it.²

As the film unfolds, the two old men reminisce about pivotal moments at the end of the Second World War, in which their lives became inextricably entangled. Piran – Pirano is a film about violence, loss, and pain, about living in a “No Neighbors’ Land,” about living without the dead as much as about living with the dead. It is a film about the social voids created in the northeastern Adriatic by the upheavals of the twentieth century. In Piran, these led to the departure of more than 90% of its ethnic Italian inhabitants—who either had long-lasting roots in the region or had come to settle there during the 20 years of fascist reign—in the decade after the war. In 1945, Piran had a population of little more than 5000. In 1956, it had barely 3600, despite the arrival of new settlers. In 1945, the ethnic Italian component had been more than 80%; in 1956, it was just below 16%.³ What happened when all those people left? The film relates this history by having one emigré return, more than 60 years later.

Piran – Pirano is Goran Vojnović’s first feature film; when he created it, he was 30 years of age. The letter ć in his name—which is not part of the Slovene alphabet—reveals the child of inner-Yugoslav migrants. He was born in Ljubljana, his mother is from Pula, on the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula (in Croatia), his father from Visoko, a small town near Sarajevo (in Bosnia-Herzegovina).⁴ His is an intimate, subtle, and very locally rooted film about an apartment which symbolizes the way in which history took place: how a place has stayed in place, but has changed completely. Vojnović shows great capacity for capturing how the void, the “No Neighbors’ Land,” unfolded in Istria at the war’s end, and how it was subsequently filled with new, different lives, and what this process did to the people who found themselves in the midst of it.

In an interview in 2018, Vojnović confirmed that Piran – Pirano was appreciated most by the people in coastal Slovenia as well as by Italians beyond the nearby state border, in Italy, who had a family history of emigration from Istria.⁵ Otherwise, in Slovenia, the film was rather ill-received.⁶ While Vojnović, in the interview, admits that he posed himself too difficult a task in his first feature film and partially failed in crafting it, he cannot help but point out that it did win awards. At the 13th Festival of Slovenian Film in the Istrian town of Portorož (It. Portorose), it won the award for best screenplay (by Vojnović), best editing, and best female actor (Nina Ivanišin as Anica).⁷ At the Festival for East European Film in Cottbus, Germany, it won the Dialogue Prize for Intercultural Communication, annually bestowed on the film which best interprets interculturality (or lack thereof). And at the Southeast European Film Festival in Paris, awards were received by the production house Arsmedia and by Mustafa Nadarević (old Veljko) as best actor.⁸

“I was born in this house” (Sono nato in questa casa), Antonio says, returning after some 60 years. How do you appropriate a place, when you were driven from it—or to it, like Veljko was? Antonio fled the bullets of the partisans; Veljko joined those very partisans in Bosnia after his mother and sister were murdered, and on 1 May 1945 was among those who liberated Piran. A few days later, he deserted after disobeying the order to shoot dead those citizens of Piran whom the partisans grabbed, in an escalating furor of violent revenge on fascism, turning their victims into “summary culprits, because their role was symbolic rather than personal,” as Triestine historian Elio Apih put it.⁹ Veljko’s refusal to arbitrarily execute (innocent or not so innocent) citizens, Antonio among them, earns him five years in Yugoslav prisons and four more in labor brigades. In 1955, he is released. Piran has emptied; Antonio’s apartment is ransacked and filled with thick dust and debris. On the square in front of the house Veljko meets Anica, the young Slovene partisan who shared his fate during the war. Looking back some 60 years later, he realizes that this re-encounter made Piran his second birthplace: Anica became his wife; he could start over.

Piran/Pirano, Istria: Film and History

The town of Pirano, at the northwestern end of the Istrian peninsula, became part of Habsburg Austria in 1797, after belonging for half a millennium to the Venetian Republic. After imperial Austria’s demise as a consequence of the First World War, Piran, as the wider region, became part of Italy with the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo.¹⁰ During the Second World War, when Italy capitulated in September 1943, the town was occupied by the Germans, as were the whole of Istria and the Littoral, including Trieste. On 1 May 1945, Piran was liberated by Slovene/Yugoslav partisans. A few weeks later, it was put under Yugoslav military command, which remained in place until the Paris Peace Treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia was signed in February 1947.¹¹

The film takes place in the six weeks between the liberation and the formal set-up of a military administration—hence, in the short period of total power vacuum, when 20 years of a brutal fascist regime and a year and a half of even more brutal German occupation had come to an end.¹² In 1947, Piran became part of the Yugoslav-administered Zone B of the provisional Free Territory of Trieste. In 1954, it became part of Titoist Yugoslavia, a decision based on a Memorandum of Understanding stipulated in London, which was finally ratified by the Treaty of Osimo between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1975.¹³ Sixteen years later, in 1991, Piran became part of now independent Slovenia. It is in this last country that film protagonist Veljko, 60-odd years after he first arrived in Piran, asks himself: Do I belong here? His wife Anica died a short time ago, and Veljko visits her grave almost daily, talking to her. Does he want to be buried here too?

One day—Veljko is at home listening sentimentally to Bosnian music—the doorbell rings. An unknown elderly man presents himself as Antonio Bartole and seeks entrance. Ending the ensuing plurilingual attempts to make himself understood, he draws the floor plan of the apartment on a piece of paper, thereby proving to the increasingly baffled Veljko that he knows the place by heart. When Antonio points to an old photo on Veljko’s sideboard and says “Anica,” revealing that he knows Veljko’s deceased wife, they recognize each other.

During the decade that the Istrian peninsula passed from Italian to Yugoslav sovereignty, anywhere between 180,000 and 225,000 individuals departed, an extended process which in Italian collective memory is known as the “exodus.” People had various motivations to leave, and their emigration was conditioned by their means as well as by the moment they chose to take action. Apart from the mass emigration of ethnic Italians, émigrés also included those who objected to Yugoslav sovereignty and/or to the new socialist order, or saw their existential economic connections with Trieste compromised, and among these were many Slovenes and Croats. In the film, Antonio’s escape from the partisan bullets by swimming more than 20 km from Piran toward Trieste takes place in May 1945, in the immediate turmoil after the liberation from German occupation. His account of his uprooted, restless life, however, represents a metaphor for the whole protracted process of mass emigration.¹⁴

I wish to emphasize that all numbers, all attempts to quantify ethnicity, need to acknowledge that national identification was neither clearcut nor fixed in wartime Istria. Neither language use nor self-identification is unequivocal, and surnames had been changed, by force or by circumstance, more than once. Population censuses always carried the politically induced imprint of those who designed them and carried out the count, and must be read accordingly.¹⁵ Approximately 70% of those who emigrated from Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste were ethnic Italians; the rest were mostly Slovenes. Given that the Italians lived mainly in coastal towns, such as in Piran, the process was particularly disruptive here. However, while the “Istrian exodus” has become part of the broader historiography of population displacements in twentieth-century Europe, the filling of the postwar social “void” has received little scholarly attention.

The Italian population of Istria was particularly vulnerable not only because they were collectively labeled as fascist but also because the Yugoslav authorities acted against “class enemies.” Most members of the wealthy and middle classes saw themselves as ethnically Italian, which is illustrated well in the film. Over 14,000 people left the small stretch of today’s Slovenian coastal region between the end of the war and October 1954, when the London Memorandum was stipulated. Especially in the early postwar years, between 1945 and 1950, many departed in illegal ways—in the film, young Antonio does just that.¹⁶

Fascism was strong in Pirano, and it destroys Antonio’s family.¹⁷ His father is an ardent fascist, whom he loathes. He is killed by the partisans in the days after the liberation. Fascism also destroys Veljko’s family. Whether his mother and sister were killed by the occupying forces (that is, Italian fascists and/or German Nazis), by Croatian Ustasha (who, under the occupiers’ control, governed the Independent State of Croatia, of which Bosnia was a part), or by Serbian Chetniks, he never knew.¹⁸

Piran’s cinematic end of the war displays all the ambivalences of the historical situation. The 20 years of fascist violence (the so-called ventennio), the years of occupation and war, as well as the revengeful Yugoslav power grab meant that violence and displacement were experiences ingrained into Istrian life worlds. As elsewhere, this included not only state-directed forms of violence but also what in Holocaust Studies has been referred to as “intimate violence,” that is, the violence of neighbors against neighbors.¹⁹ The chance to settle private scores was taken by many.²⁰

Piran – Pirano leaves little doubt that the Yugoslav partisans liberated Piran from German occupation and from Italian fascism. People cheer, rejoice, sing, celebrate. It is Veljko’s doubtful and isolated wandering through the town that signals the looming terror. The film peaks when Veljko refuses to obey the order to kill at random and escapes together with Anica and Antonio. In panic, Antonio chooses the sea route and sets out to swim to Trieste. Anica and Veljko do not join him; they await their fate on the beach. When the fellow partisans find them, the commander orders his men to “put him in prison so that he is safe from the bullets.” Reminiscing, old Veljko ponders: “God knows why they didn’t kill us. […] They took us back to Piran, they let her go and I spent five years in prisons. Five years in prison, and four more years in labor brigades.”

The Apartment

The film takes place in the apartment that once belonged to Antonio’s family and now belongs to Veljko’s. The apartment symbolizes property and questions it at the same time. Most scenes were shot with very little light and in a rather static manner.²¹ Importantly, the window has a view onto one of Piran’s larger central spaces, Piazza vecchia (Old Square), which would change its name after the war and today is still called First-of-May Square (Prvomajski trg), in reference to 1 May 1945, the day of Piran’s liberation from the Nazis and the fascists—a very apt setting. For centuries the square had been a central place in Venetian Piran (hence Old Square). Significantly, the old name has survived among the locals, and not only in Italian, which is testament to how historically grown identities can hardly be wiped out with one violent stroke of the brush.²²

While the apartment’s property is negotiated throughout the film, it is never made clear who actually owns it, and how such ownership may have changed. The apartment is the prime location for Antonio and Veljko’s encounter and the unfolding of the story. When Antonio rings the bell, Veljko opens the door and sees a visibly emotional stranger. They have no common language. When Antonio draws the floor plan of the apartment on a piece of paper, he proves to Veljko that he is in fact no stranger at all. Taking advantage of Veljko’s astonished bafflement, Antonio enters the apartment. He walks around lost in his memories, and it is as if Veljko has vanished even though he stands right next to him, alarmed but increasingly curious. Finally, Antonio looks at Veljko and says twice: Casa mia (My home). The two words are unequivocal even to those who do not understand Italian. They send Veljko into an angry fit: “This is my home! Not your home! My home! […] I have lived here for more than 50 years with my wife … […] Listen, Italy is over there! Get out of my house!”

Moments later, they recognize each other, and this is followed by the first flashback scene, taking the story back to 1945. Here, young Antonio and his father Ettore are in the apartment. Ettore hectically gathers jewelry and other valuables from drawers, and it is clear that this is a wealthy bourgeois family. Antonio begs him: “You cannot leave me here. The Germans are retreating—it is too dangerous.” Full of hate, he watches his father’s frenzied efforts to escape with at least some of his property: “Sell everything!” He makes a desperate and half-hearted attempt to stop him. But after a moment of tender hesitation, Ettore goes, without a word, without turning back. Antonio bursts out: “Fascist swine!” He retreats into the apartment, forlorn and fearful.

Then, for the larger part of the film, the apartment is the location of a sequence of further encounters, as if it were a stage in a theater. All involve Antonio, who never leaves his place. First enters a group of partisans looking for Antonio’s father, whom they obviously know, as they call him the “big black bastard.” Antonio, in a panic, hides in a corner. The men behave carelessly, but not destructively, and leave a few minutes later. Next enters Anica, the only female partisan whom the film introduces in more detail.²³ Recognizing her, Antonio comes out of hiding. What follows is a long monologue, as Anica remains silent. She stares at the young Italian, haunted by images of how the fascists brutally killed her family.

Antonio assures her that he is no fascist. He reminds her that they went to school together. Finally, Anica attacks him, still without a word, and attempts to strangle him. When he realizes that she is serious, he frees himself, repeating again: “I am no fascist! The fascists killed my mother!” Anica, visibly disturbed by pain and despair, is still mute. Antonio tries again: “Anica, don’t you recognize me? I know you, I know who you are.” Only when he relates an episode from school that involves his mother does Anica finally speak. “Your mum had the longest fingers in the world,” she says in Italian. The ice is broken. The two end up making love, and when Anica looks at Antonio and smiles before she falls asleep, it is clear that he has managed to bring her back into touch with life. Some 60 years later, Antonio still harbors Anica’s smile in his heart; in fact, they made each other feel alive again. Unsurprisingly, however, the next morning, Anica wakes up horrified. Antonio, her gentle and friendly former classmate, so seemingly easily interfered with her vow to take revenge on all Italians.

Finally, it is Veljko’s turn to enter the apartment. He is sent by the commander to guard Antonio’s mother’s piano. Astonished to find his fellow partisan Anica together with a young Italian in what he knows is the apartment of a fascist, he furiously chases Antonio out. This is the moment when Antonio leaves forever the house in which he grew up. After that, Anica and Veljko are silent. When they finally speak, it is to realize their shared fate:

Anica: “Did they really kill all your family? […] Why didn’t you shoot that Italian if they really killed everybody?”

Veljko: “Why would I kill him?”

Anica: “Revenge.”

Veljko: “And what then? What if I killed all of them? What? I ask you, what? I don’t know who killed my family, and where they dumped them. Even if I killed all Germans, all Italians, all Ustasha, all Chetniks, it wouldn’t bring back my mother and my sister alive from those waters.”

He falls silent, realizing that for the first time he has said out loud what happened to his family. The audience understands why he would never swim in the sea. Veljko sobs quietly, but the scene lasts only a brief moment. The other partisans enter loudly and suddenly—they have come for the piano.

With the removal of its most valuable piece of property, everybody leaves the apartment for good. It only appears once more at the end of the film, in 1955, when four men inspect the ransacked rooms. This is the moment when the London Memorandum enabled the people of the Free Territory of Trieste to opt for either Yugoslav or Italian citizenship and choose their country of residence accordingly. Between 1955 and the end of February 1957, when the legal time frame expired, another wave of emigration hit the coastal region of today’s Slovenia, when more than 10,000 people opted for Italian citizenship. Of these, about 29% were ethnic Slovenes, and a slightly lower proportion were Croats, in spite of the authorities’ efforts to discourage the emigration of non-ethnic Italians. By then, since the war’s end, almost 24,400 people had left the region—almost 53% of the population of 1945. Migration within and to the region had started immediately, trailing the emigration flows. In the early postwar years, people moved from the wider hinterland to the coast, replacing those who left. These were administrative employees as well as employees of the newly established political, social, and cultural institutions, importantly among them: teachers, to re-establish the education system that had been destroyed by the fascists; personnel in theaters, libraries, banks, and public health services; as well as engineers, technicians, architects. Importantly, the economy was to be revived in a way that cut short its traditional dependence on Trieste. The film’s 1955 scene is thus set at the moment when an increased influx of people arrived from other regions of Slovenia and wider Yugoslavia—almost 12,500 between 1955 and 1956 alone, thus exceeding the number of departures by 21%, and another 7000 by 1959, totaling almost 20,000 people. Piran, however, would not return to its 1945 size before 1961, when it once again reached a scarce 5500 inhabitants.²⁴

One of these immigrants triggered by the London Memorandum of 1954 is Veljko, the former partisan. He had spent the decade since the war’s end in prison and labor brigades. Entering the apartment, he is silent, while the other three men comment in a rather unimpressed manner: “It is like in a museum here.” “The whole town is like a museum. There is nobody anywhere.” Veljko finally utters a horrified “I won’t stay here” and runs out. On the square, he recognizes Anica as one of two women walking by. They will make the apartment their home. It is never revealed how they were able to do this, and of course it is quite improbable that they would have ended up living in this very apartment. But the metaphor works.

When Antonio returns some 60 years later, it turns out that he has brought with him his testament. Veljko reads it with the help of his chatty neighbor Mira, who speaks Italian:

It says: ‘My name is Antonio Bartole. I was born in Piran. My mother was a pianist, my father a teacher. Both died during the war’ … he lived in Trieste, got engaged, but his fiancé moved to America. […] He now lives by himself, in Milan. He doesn’t have anyone to give his belongings to. And all that he wishes for is to stay in Piran, his place of birth. To die in Piran: Morire a Pirano.

Neighbor Mira is neither puzzled nor sufficiently surprised by the testament or its contents, thereby personifying the tacit knowledge of the local population: “Where did you get this?” Veljko answers dismissively: “I found it in the closet”—as if by listening to Antonio’s testament he had witnessed the unleashing of a skeleton. The scene aptly encapsulates what Dan Diner has called the multiple temporalities of material property loss, which in many places was accompanied by a process of memory erasure of both the legal rights to private property and the times past.²⁵ While Mira translates the testament for Veljko, the camera returns to Antonio, in the apartment, looking at Anica and Veljko’s wedding photograph. Veljko, who only a few days before had thought about going back to his native Bosnia to die, upon hearing Antonio’s final wish—morire a Pirano—runs back to his apartment, shouting (in Bosnian):

Hey, you will not die here! […] What if I went back to Bosnia to die in one house, just because I was born there? What if everybody just knocked on somebody’s door, like you did to me? What if everybody went to somebody’s house to die there? What would happen? World War Three would happen!

Having over-exerted himself, Veljko ends his fit of rage by clutching his chest. He stumbles backward, panting. The two old men look at each other. Veljko sighs heavily, then goes to fetch some spirits and two glasses. Antonio accepts. Veljko says, in Bosnian: “Many years have passed. Very many. Many things have happened. My whole life has happened.” Afterward they sit, drink, and tell each other their memories—one speaking Italian, the other Bosnian.

Piran as Property

The film contains several scenes of belonging and “othering” that concern the town of Piran. Whose is it? At the beginning, before Antonio even appears, Veljko confesses: “I think I do not belong to this place.” He is talking to two old friends over a game of chess. One, Dimče, was born in Macedonia, thus impersonating a postwar inner-Yugoslav migrant; the other remains more vaguely defined. Italians clearly are the “other” to all three. Dimče mocks Veljko, suggesting that if he decided not to be buried in Piran’s cemetery, “some Italian might lie down next to Anica.” The conversation then turns to the question of whether Veljko is a true Piranese. He asks: “Do you think anybody is buried up there who has never swum in the sea?,” inviting more mockery. His friends insist: “Are you a Piranese, or aren’t you?” Veljko is now convinced: “Of course I am! And a truer one than you! Truer than all of you. It was me who liberated this town! And if I don’t want to bathe in the sea, I don’t want to bathe in the sea!” The friend still teases: “But what kind of Piranese is that, who has never swum in the sea?” There is an interesting linguistic twist in his question. He speaks Slovene, but uses the Italian word for the town’s citizens, Piranese (Slovene would be Pirančan). As is observable in the persistence of old street names, the now dominant local language, Slovene, has retained the centuries-old Venetian, that is, Italian, word for the locals. At this question, Veljko snaps at them: “That you all may drown in that sea of yours!” both othering himself and placing a finger on the very wound that has haunted him for decades.

Antonio never returned to Piran after his escape. The film makes it quite clear that he has never filled the void left by losing his parents, as a consequence of both fascism and the revenge of the Yugoslav forces, and by being forced out of his home. It is not clear whether he ever found out that his father was executed by the partisans. He searched for him in Trieste’s displaced persons camps for a long time,²⁶ even preventing himself from following his love Olga, a Polish woman, to “America.”

Antonio bases his property rights concerning Piran on his birthright. What triggers his return is being alone: he does not have anyone to whom to leave his property. He does not come to Piran to reclaim his lost property, the apartment, but to reattach to the only place he ever felt to be his home. The film’s artistic device of having the two men meet in the one place that they both feel is theirs is a well-crafted metaphor for the history of displacement as a consequence of the Second World War.²⁷ Both lost their family and their home. Veljko found a new one, and it happens to be the one Antonio lost. Both have lived displaced lives. Yet Veljko chose not to return to Bosnia: “In 1954 they told me I could return home, to Bosnia. But what home? I said I’d never return there alive.” Veljko, the former partisan, joined the many who came to Istria from broader Yugoslavia to fill the emptied Istrian towns. He had paid dearly for his refusal to kill arbitrarily, but might in fact have survived only because his partisan commander decided to send him to prison. Otherwise he would have faced execution. None of this prevents him, some 60 years later, from perceiving himself as a true Piranese citizen because he was among those who liberated the town from the Nazis and the fascists.

The Languages Spoken

It is the properties of language that make Piran – Pirano such an intimate, nuanced, and local endeavor: Slovene, Italian, and Bosnian, and not just the standard languages but including dialects and local variants. Language is used ambiguously—one moment it seems to be a barrier, the next it implies a comprehensive plurilingualism as Piran’s everyday normality. Most importantly, the two old men who drink together and reminisce about their entangled, yet departed lives have no common language—but they do understand each other. That mutual understanding is possible is one of the messages the film sends to the region’s still forcefully divided memoryscape, characterized by traces of the past “inscribed in its materiality.”²⁸

The trilingual stage is set when Veljko’s daughter Nina visits with her husband Roberto and their children Monica and Mauro—the scene is a metaphor for the linguistic realities of the northeastern Adriatic region today. Nina speaks Slovene with Veljko, who answers partly in Bosnian, partly in Slovene. Mauro, the grandson, first speaks in Italian. Nina tells him in (cleaned up) Venetian dialect to give grandpa the present they brought: a CD of Bosnian folk tunes, downloaded from the internet. Both children now address their grandfather in Slovene. Roberto, the Italian husband, is mute until he stiffly shakes hands with Veljko and articulates a “Na svidenje” (goodbye, in Slovene) with an awful accent, making a polite effort. It is not clear whether he is an Istrian Italian or an Italian from Italy, but the latter seems more likely. The neighbor Mira, who comes to greet Nina and the children, chats away merrily in Slovene, but when she bumps the door into Roberto quite naturally apologizes with an “O dio, mi scusi” (Oh God, I am so sorry). In the whole film, bi- or plurilingualism is a property exclusively of the Slavs, while the Italians know nothing but Italian—a rather faithful depiction of the (historical) reality.

When Antonio presents himself to Veljko in Italian, the latter interrupts him: “Speak Slovene, this is Slovenia, and we speak Slovene here.” The fact that Piran by law is a bilingual Slovene–Italian town makes this self-defensive nationalism of an old Bosnian even more awkward. When Antonio does enter the apartment, Veljko immediately switches to Bosnian, in which he continues to address Antonio for the remainder of the film.

When Yugoslavia was destroyed in the wars of the 1990s, “naming its language” became a problem. Serbo-Croatian became Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin, or BCSM. The collective term used by people in the successor states of Yugoslavia today, when they address their language(s) without wishing to nationalize it, is the word naški, which is short for “our language” (naš jezik), the suffix -ki being the one that characterizes linguistic adjectives (slovenski/Slovene, bosanski/Bosnian, etc.). Slovene, however, is quite different from Serbo-Croatian and its successors and is not usually included. When it is, the term naški obtains an even more comprehensively Yugoslav meaning. This is what Veljko does in the film: when Antonio asks him for a glass of water, he says “acqua” and then confirms “yes voda, voda.” This is the only word he says in Slovene, and it is the same in Bosnian. Veljko grumbles: “Ah, so you do know naški when you need it,” thus avoiding having to choose whether the word voda is Slovene or Bosnian.²⁹

Connected to this is the flashback scene in which Veljko meets Anica again in 1955. It is a scene about the loss of linguistic properties. It is also a statement about how the ethnic and thereby linguistic “cleansing” failed. The newly arrived Yugoslav population were quite ignorant about Piran’s half-millennium of Venetian history. In the film, Veljko is in the square while the other three men stand on the apartment’s balcony. One of the two women seen nearby greets the other in Italian: “Anica, finally! I’ve waited quite a bit for you!” Hearing her name, Veljko turns around. When the women approach the public fountain, one of the men on the balcony shouts in Serbo-Croatian: “Comradesses, that fountain is not working!” Anica’s friend replies in Venetian dialect: “What did you say, boy?” The man is puzzled: “What did she say?” They even discuss whether she might be speaking Spanish and greet her with a silly “Señorita, arrivederci!” to which she replies: “I don’t understand you!”

The Piano

In the present, there is no piano in the apartment. Where it once stood, there is a table. Antonio, lost in his memories, stops at the table and says “Here was the piano.” He pretends to press piano keys on the table’s rim, playing a silent tune. Veljko is incredulous: “How do you know that a piano stood here?” Antonio remembers how he sat next to his mother when she played and how he had to be very quiet so as not to disturb her. It is this memory that makes him say those two very virulent words: Casa mia.

In the flashbacks to 1945, the piano represents two property functions. “What, this fucking fascist had his own piano?!” one of the partisans observes upon entering the apartment. The commander responds: “His wife was a piano teacher. A good woman. She died some time ago. Laura … […]. He was a fascist drunkard. He taught the children about Mussolini. He beat kids and never protected his wife.” On the one hand, the piano is a symbol of (Italian) bourgeoisness and wealth, something the Slovene partisans are envious of. On the other hand, the instrument brings forth something like positive neighborliness, as Antonio’s mother is remembered benevolently, and pitied. The Slovene partisans agree with Antonio in their judgment of his mother and father.

It is the piano—and the memory of Antonio’s mother—that finally brings Anica to speak up during her encounter with Antonio. He opens the piano’s lid: “For four years, nobody has touched this piano. They forbade my mother to play the music she loved. And that is why she died.” He plays cautiously—without making a sound, much like old Antonio does at Veljko’s table. The scene is the prelude to their lovemaking, and thus the piano is the central device for humanity, for humans making contact with each other beyond ideological and ethnic stereotypes.

Later it is revealed why the partisan commander was fond of Antonio’s mother. His fiancé Petra was a pianist, too. She died under circumstances that are not explained, probably at the hands of the local fascists. He is torn between an urge to take revenge and common sense. At one moment, he returns to the apartment, sits at the piano, and strikes some disharmonic tunes, his face tight with pain and rage. He later orders Veljko to guard the piano, to make sure that nobody touches it, “not our guys, nor theirs.”

After Antonio is forced to leave the apartment by Veljko, he is quickly captured by the partisans. The commander extends his fond memory of the mother to the son, looking at Antonio’s hands: “Pianista, huh?” He then engages in a twisted effort at revenge, when he carves a piano keyboard onto a table rim with his knife and orders: “Suonare!” (Play!). Antonio, in mortal fear, raises his hands and plays the simulated keyboard silently—this is the third scene symbolizing how Antonio’s memory of his mother was silenced. Again, a metaphor for how humanity was lost, on all sides. The commander finally reveals what haunts him: “My Petra used to play that way. I joined the partisans hoping I could get her a real piano. If I hadn’t done so, she could still be alive.”

The piano finds its new place beneath a photograph of Tito at the partisans’ headquarters. Antonio is forced to play, and his tune accompanies the commander’s explanation to Veljko:³⁰

Before we found you, there in the woods, we had a messenger boy, Drejc. He was quick as lightning. His schoolmate betrayed him, and the next morning the fascists killed him. He was 12. If we want to get rid of all fascists and traitors, those who are innocent will also have to die. […] Why are you looking at me? It was not us who started this war! It was not us who made the rules! Do you understand? The fascists did! It was not me who made up this shit!

Looking at a group of prisoners, the commander asks Veljko: “What would you do with these fascists if you were in my place?” Veljko answers: “How should I know? I see them for the first time! […] They’re all the same to me. You are all the same to me.”

This dialogue is the prelude to the film’s climax. The partisans, who have quickly gone from liberators to execution squad, drag the prisoners into the courtyard, Antonio included. The commander is nowhere to be seen and the situation escalates quickly. A moment later everybody is shot dead except Antonio. Veljko has fired into the air. Partisan Miha, decidedly the most impulsive and bloodthirsty among the partisans, is furious, threatens, and finally shoots at him, missing by a few inches. The others turn on Miha: “What’s wrong with you? […] What, now we start to kill each other?” Miha discovers Anica standing round a corner and points his gun at her: “Come here! What are you looking at?” While the others try to calm Miha down and prevent further shooting, Antonio seizes the moment of confusion, grabs Anica, and they run. Veljko, after a second of hesitation, follows. The three run for their lives: the Italian antifascist, the Bosnian partisan, and the Slovene female partisan. All the while, the commander sits at the piano, now his piano, playing an awkward tune.

Family Graves

Old Veljko is introduced to the audience crouching by his wife’s grave in Piran’s cemetery. “Remember?” he complains, “We had a deal that I would be the one to go first.” Later, he says to his daughter Nina: “You know me … and graves,” when she urges him to agree to buy the plot next to Anica’s in order to build their family grave. Veljko is wrapped up in his thoughts about going back to Bosnia now that his wife is gone, and tells her to leave him out of it.

During the war, graves were a matter of the moment, if at all. The scene that introduces young Veljko in 1945 has him walking with his fellow partisans in the Karst mountains, in Piran’s hinterland. They carry a body, a friend of Veljko’s, possibly a Bosnian too. They are looking for somewhere to bury the fallen comrade, and it is Veljko who decides on the place. When asked by the commander “Why here?” he responds: “It’s the smell.” His chief asks: “It smells right? What, does it smell of Bosnia?”

When Antonio is chased from his apartment by Veljko, he runs until he reaches Piran’s cemetery. He stops at the grave of his mother, who died in 1942, as the gravestone reveals. Breathless and helpless, Antonio lies down on the cold stone, cowering like a child, shivering, yearning for comfort. Later, after Antonio’s escape by sea, Anica and Veljko cower on the beach, equally helplessly. They speak about how to deal with loss and the need to mourn:

Anica: “Veljko, I am a partisan and a communist. I don’t believe in God. But I’d like to say a prayer for him [Antonio].”

Veljko shrugs.

Anica: “I prayed also for my family. I need to do something. It makes it easier.”

Veljko: “One prayer is as good as no prayer. Pray.”

A bit later, she asks: “Do you think they will shoot us?”

Veljko: “How should I know? … But if they do, I’d like to be buried at an unknown place.”

Anica: “Why?”

Veljko: “All mine are somewhere where nobody knows. If I’m buried like that too maybe we’ll be together again.”

It will take more than 60 years and Antonio’s return to make him understand for good that this is not his fate. At the film’s end, Veljko calls his daughter. He speaks Bosnian: “I have thought about what we were talking about. About the grave. Find out about it.”

Conclusion, or Mnemonic Properties

The film Piran – Pirano engages with a broad notion of neighbors. They are not only the people living next door or the people you know in town, from school, from church. They are also the “other” who lives nearby, the ethnic other, the social other, the friend with a shared migrant background, maybe even the other “over there,” in Italy. Thereby, the notion of “void,” of “no neighbors’ land,” is also a broad one, both diachronically and synchronically speaking. Created by the war and its aftermath, it proves very persistent. Veljko met Anica again in 1955 and chose never to go back to his native Bosnia. But the loss continues to haunt him. He tried twice to return, even borrowed money to buy the train ticket, but each time failed to depart at the last moment. In 1984, he denied Anica her wish to go to the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. And yet after her death he feels estranged. The void clearly never left him.

Antonio too has harbored the void left by his escape from Piran. He actually does what Veljko only thinks about: he returns to his birthplace. There is an unanswered question in the film about why he never returned earlier—only a vague hint at the unbearable. When Yugoslavia existed, it might have felt unsafe, but even after its dissolution he did not venture to Slovenia for many years.

Anica is the one who heals a part of both of them. This can certainly be seen as cliché-ridden, or kitschy. But then, why would love and human connection be regarded as kitsch? Antonio’s version is by far the sadder one, as he idealizes the one short moment he and Anica had together. His memory of her ultimately upholds his link to Piran, together with the memory of and love for his mother.

Veljko also loses Anica in 1945. But ten years later they meet again, right beneath Antonio’s apartment, in which they will build their life together. This is another silence in the film, as it never hints at how or why they moved into this apartment, of all places. What did they actually think about living in somebody else’s property, and a property of a person they both knew? Anica had even gone to school with Antonio, and had an intimate relationship with him. One might think that, ultimately, she, or both she and Veljko, truly gained their moment of private, silent, almost unconscious revenge—through property seizure.

The motif of revenge is a red thread throughout the film. Does revenge help someone to overcome loss, pain, traumatic experiences of violence and displacement? Anica tries to engage with it. When encountering her former schoolmate Antonio, she realizes how her hatred of Italians is not so easily collectivizable as she would wish. Antonio has no opportunity for revenge. His return some 60 years later is not motivated by the need to make good on his expropriation. Veljko is the one who refuses to take revenge and deserts in order to avoid committing a crime.

Why is Vojnović’s engagement with the historical properties of the region courageous? Slovenian society today is even more divided over the memory of the Second World War than it was in 2010, when the film was released.³¹ In the last 20 years, Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia have engaged in a fierce and harmful competition over who was perpetrator and who was victim during the war.³² In 2004, the year that neighboring Slovenia joined the EU, Italy instated a national holiday, the Giorno del Ricordo (Remembrance Day), which intends, among other things, to make (Italian) fascist violence pale compared to the crimes of the (Yugoslav) communists.³³ In reaction, since 2005, Slovenia has celebrated the “Day when the Coastal Region Returned to Its Motherland” on 15 September, the day of the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1947. A recent attempt to change the word vrnitev (return) to priključitev (incorporation, or annexation) did not receive sufficient votes to be made national law. The change would make the name historically correct, as the region had never been a part of the “motherland” (Yugoslavia, now Slovenia) before, and thus in 1947 could not be “returned.”³⁴

Vojnović sneaks a forceful, yet not so easily detectable metaphor of resistance—and of Yugoslavia, of Slovene–Bosnian relations—into his film. During a night scene in the camp, the partisans sit by the open fire, singing. Female voices dominate, which is peculiar, given that all except Anica are shown to be men. These voices belong to members of the Ljubljana-based women’s choir Kombinat, whose repertoire focuses on “songs of resistance from around the world.”³⁵ To Piran – Pirano, they contribute the “Bilećanka,” a partisan classic written for the occasion of 1 May 1940. The composer was the Slovene Milan Apih, an internee in a concentration camp in the Herzegovinian town of Bileća. The interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia maintained a prison for political opponents here, mostly (at the time illegally operating) communists.³⁶

In Piran – Pirano, when the partisans take over on 1 May 1945, the crowd that gathers on the square carries banners with slogans such as “Vogliamo la Yugoslavia” (“We want Yugoslavia,” in Italian), “Smo Slovenci” (“We are Slovenes”), and “Živel Tito” (“Long Live Tito,” both in Slovene). A man speaks in Italian and asks the “Piranese citizens” to “welcome our communist Yugoslav friends. Let’s celebrate together under the beautiful red flag of the revolution!” In another scene, a man paints “W Tito” on the wall of a narrow passageway, through which three other men pass, carrying different flags: the Soviet one, the Yugoslav one, and the Italian one adorned with a red star. As Rolf Wörsdörfer aptly put it, “Slovenes, Croats and Italians had probably never been closer to each other than during certain moments of their fight against the German occupier.”³⁷

If in Italy the focus of remembrance had been as much on this joint antifascist legacy as it has been on the communist crimes, on self-victimization and downsizing fascist crimes, and if in Slovenia (and Croatia) the plight of the Istrian refugees and emigrants had received a more differentiated acknowledgment, the “burden of the past”³⁸ might have been somewhat alleviated by now. Instead, the northeastern Adriatic borderland is but one of many in Europe where contentions about the properties of history abound. Majda Širca, in her account of the role that Piran has played in Slovenia’s cinematic history, aptly sums up Vojnović’s metaphor of property: “‘Piran – Pirano’ is a film that tells us all that Piran is, why it is what it is, and why it is how it is. […] Why the contemporary history of Piran is schizophrenic, full of traumas and stories of deportation. […] At her [Anica’s] grave mourns the one who, in this history, is the winner: the former partisan, who [however] today has been expropriated of everything, except his memories—and his grave.”³⁹