A little-known story of the Julian-Dalmatian exodus in Sardinia. It was an interesting discovery for the students of the Paglietti high school in Porto Torres who, in recent days, visited the Egea Ecomuseum in Fertilia, a village in Alghero born in 1936 to accommodate the excess population of the province of Ferrara. In 1947 it became a collection center for Istrian, Julian and Dalmatian exiles who, fleeing Tito's Yugoslavia, found a home in Fertilia managing to escape the horror of the sinkholes.
Some Philosophy and Art History teachers of the Porto Torres high school have undertaken a project aimed at recalling some significant passages in contemporary Italian history, through the search for evidence to recover the historical memory of the territory to which they belong. A simple glance at the map of Nurra and its surroundings was therefore enough for the pupils to discover that the happy ending of a dramatic epic that concerned an important piece of Italian history between 1943 and 1970.
The students in Fertilia were welcomed by Marco Cossu, president of E.GI.S (Ente Giuliano di Sardegna), who illustrated the day's program before taking them to the Egea Ecomuseum, where they met Mauro Manca, president of the Aegean Association, as well as the nephew of an Istrian refugee. Mauro told the students the story of the city and of the people who populated it over time starting from the arrival of the Ferrara people in the 1920s with the reclamation of the Calik lagoon and the surrounding agricultural areas. The community was then integrated by families from the former colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rhodes and Libya, but the bulk of the community is still today made up of Istrian and Dalmatian-Julian exiles. People who fled their land who still struggle strenuously to safeguard their identity and preserve the memory of the tragedy suffered in the immediate post-war years. Remaining in Istria meant for them giving up being Italian and forcibly becoming Slavs. For those who opposed it, imprisonment and in the worst case infoibamento were envisaged.
Symbol and icon of the drama but also of redemption is Egea, the "girl with a suitcase" whose story the museum tells and preserves the original photo donated last year by Egea Affner, a surviving witness of the exodus. The day concluded with a meeting at the E.GI.S. the writer Marisa Brugna who in her autobiography "Memoria negata" recounts her escape, her stay in a refugee camp for over ten years and finally the freedom achieved with landing in Sardinia.
