Sara... Was your family from Istria Region...? I wonder if the Dobar Tek restaurant in San Telmo has good Burek.... yummi
Yes, my grandparents were from
Fiume (Rijeka in Croatian) and they were part of the about 350,000 Italian exiles who had to flew the territory during the Communist occupation by Tito.
Despite the origin of my family is mixed - my grandpa was from an Austrian or German family and my grandma was mixed Italian-Croatian - they always felt Italian, and Italian has always been their main language (along the Fiuman (local dialect), German and Croatian).
Anyway, I have had a "foreign" surname all my life and in Italy I was always taken for a foreigner (and sometimes it was
not in a pleasant way), also because I
do look like an Austrian gal.
It looks like history totally forgot about Italian exiles, giving much relevance to the Holocaust (which affected less people in Italy, but more worldwide) than to the
foibe killings, which consisted in throwing live or dead persons in naturally formed underground cavities and sealing the hole at the surface. I went to visit one of them - actually it is just a large and heavy steel tap on the entrance of one of the biggest foibe of the region (in Basovizza).
Family tradition says a family cousin shot himself when he was warned that the Croatians were coming to arrest him.
My surname is the result of a phonetic transcription of an Austrian-German surname. At those times, my ancestors lived presumably in what was called Prussia, but I can't say for certain whether they originally lived in Potsdam (just south of Berlin) or in Wien. Apparently one of my ancestor worked for the Postal/Shipping Service of the Austro-Hungarian empire and was assigned to various posts in his life. Oral traditions says that ancestor became the Chief of the port of Fiume, which was very important at those times (together with Venice and Trieste), and even owned an Island in the Croatia archipelago. Needless to say there is no paper to prove this, and even if there was, Croatians have been s***er with Italians for many years, for example trying to avoid them to visit back their cities because they were afraid they would claim back their houses - they were held and questioned for all day at the border even in the '60s and '70s.
But the Italian State was no less shameful in this story, as they made an agreement with Croatians, for which the Italian exiles could decide whether try to get back their houses (provided that they had the papers, they had to file a claim in a Croatian court, who sabotaged they requests) or they could give up any right they had in the now-Croatian territory in exchange of a post-war support for exiles.
There is a strong community of people from Istria and Friuli-Venezia-Giulia & Dalmazia, even here in Buenos Aires
there are severals. Many of the exiles moved abroad (South Africa, Australia, North America and South America), others stayed in Italy (Trieste, Genoa, Rome) or wherever they had family or a friend at those times.
My grandma used to cook all these delicious stuff from Istria, which was a mix of Austrian, Hungarian, Italian and Croatian cuisine (heavy stuff, but hearty). Also my grandpa's strudel was epic, but I didn't like that sort of sweets when I was a dumb girl. In the Austrian-German world they said a girl is ready to be married when she can roll properly the dough of strudel!
I brought over with me two recipes books from my grandma, printed in the '40s, which contained recipes also from Istria. I came across a modern version of these classic books but the recipes from the Eastern territories were removed. It is such a shame - Italy was not only Meridione and Siciliani, though these are the ones who made themselves a (sometimes questionable) name across the world.
I so wish my grandparents stayed around longer so that I could learn to cook from them! Instead I am bound with recipes from the rest of Italy taken from one of the many websites.
The Croatian burek is very similar to the burek of the Turks and Greeks, so you might find it in their restaurants, which are more common!
