Rijeka

The Roman arch (Rimski luk), the oldest architectural monument in Rijeka and an entrance to the old town

Trsat Castle lies at the exact spot of an ancient Illyrian and Roman fortress.

Though traces of Neolithic settlements can be found in the region, the earliest modern settlements on the site were Celtic Tharsatica (modern Trsat, now part of Rijeka) on the hill, and the tribe of mariners, the Liburni, in the natural harbour below. The city long retained its dual character. Rijeka was first mentioned in the 1st century AD by Pliny the Elder as Tarsatica in his Natural History (iii.140).[8]

In the time of Augustus, the Romans rebuilt Tharsatica as a municipium Flumen (MacMullen 2000), situated on the right bank of small river Rječina (whose name means "the big river"). It became a city within the Roman Province of Dalmatia until the 6th century.

The Baroque city clock tower above the arched gateway linking the Korzo to the inner city, designed by Filbert Bazarig in 1876

Main street Korzo

After the 4th century Rijeka was rededicated to St. Vitus, the city's patron saint, as Terra Fluminis sancti Sancti Viti or in German Sankt Veit am Pflaum. From the 5th century onwards, the town was ruled successively by the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines, the Lombards, and the Avars. Croats settled the city starting in the 7th century giving it the Croatian name, Rika svetoga Vida ("the river of Saint Vitus"). At the time, Rijeka was a feudal stronghold surrounded by a wall. At the center of the city, its highest point, was a fortress.

In 799 Rijeka was attacked by the Frankish troops of Charlemagne. Their Siege of Trsat was at first repulsed, during which the Frankish commander Duke Eric of Friuli was killed. However, the Frankish forces finally occupied and devastated the castle, while the Duchy of Croatia passed under the overlordship of the Carolingian Empire. From about 925, the town was part of the Kingdom of Croatia, from 1102 in personal union with Hungary. Trsat Castle and the town was rebuilt under the rule of the House of Frankopan. In 1288 the Rijeka citizens signed the Law codex of Vinodol, one of the oldest codes of law in Europe.

Rijeka even rivalled with Venice when it was purchased by the Habsburg emperor Frederick III, Archduke of Austria in 1466. It would remain under Habsburg overlordship for over 450 years, except for French rule between 1805 and 1813, until its occupation by Croatian and subsequently Italian irregulars at the end of World War I.[9]

Rijeka and Trsat

Tram in Rijeka

River Rječina in city center

After coming under Habsburg rule in 1466, the town was attacked and plundered by Venetian forces in 1509. While Ottoman forces attacked the town several times, they never occupied it. From the 16th century onwards, Rijeka was largely rebuilt in its present Renaissance and Baroque style. Emperor Charles VI declared the Port of Rijeka a free port (together with the Port of Trieste) in 1719 and had the trade route to Vienna expanded in 1725.

By order of Empress Maria Theresa in 1779, the city was annexed to the Kingdom of Hungary and governed as corpus separatum directly from Budapest by an appointed governor, as Hungary's only international port. From 1804, Rijeka was part of the Austrian Empire (Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia after the Compromise of 1867), in the Croatia-Slavonia province.[10]

In the early 19th century, the prominent economical and cultural leader of the city was Andrija Ljudevit Adamić. Fiume also had a significant naval base, and in the mid-19th century it became the site of the Austro-Hungarian Naval Academy (K.u.K. Marine-Akademie), where the Austro-Hungarian Navy trained its officers.

Giovanni de Ciotta (mayor from 1872 to 1896) proved to be an authoritative local political leader. Under his leadership, an impressive phase of expansion of the city started, marked by major port development, fuelled by the general expansion of international trade and the city's connection (1873) to the Austro-Hungarian railway network. Modern industrial and commercial enterprises such as the Royal Hungarian Sea Navigation Company "Adria", and the paper mill, situated in the Rječina canyon, producing cigarette paper sold around the world, became trademarks of the city.

The second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (up to World War I) was a period of rapid economic growth and technological dynamism for Rijeka. The industrial development of the city included the first industrial scale oil refinery in Europe in 1882[11] and the first torpedo factory in the world in 1866, after Robert Whitehead, manager of the "Stabilimento Tecnico Fiumano" (an Austrian engineering company engaged in providing engines for the Austro-Hungarian Navy), designed and successfully tested the world's first torpedo.

Rijeka also became a pioneering centre for high-speed photography. The Austrian physicist Peter Salcher working in Rijeka's Austro-Hungarian Marine Academy took the first photograph of a bullet flying at supersonic speed in 1886, devising a technique that was later used by Ernst Mach in his studies of supersonic motion.[12]

Casa Veneziana in Rijeka

Leaning Tower

Saint Vitus cathedral

Rijeka's port underwent tremendous development fuelled by generous Hungarian investments, becoming the main maritime outlet for Hungary and the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the fifth port in the Mediterranean, after Marseilles, Genoa, Naples and Trieste. The population grew rapidly from only 21,000 in 1880 to 50,000 in 1910. Major civic buildings constructed at this time include the Governor's Palace, designed by the Hungarian architect Alajos Hauszmann. There was an ongoing competition between Rijeka and Trieste, the main maritime outlet for Austria—reflecting the rivalry between the two components of the Dual Monarchy. The Austro-Hungarian Navy sought to keep the balance by ordering new warships from the shipyards of both cities.

Apart from the rapid economic growth, the period encompassing the second half of the 19th century and up to World War I also saw a shift in the ethnic composition of the city. The Kingdom of Hungary, which administered the city during that period, favoured the Hungarian element in the city and encouraged immigration from all lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this period the city became a melting pot encompassing most of the main ethnicities and cultures in the empire, being also a main departure port for emigration to the New World. The mixed ethnic composition would open the doors to the controversial "Fiume Question" in the years following World War I and the demise of the Habsburg Empire. At the last Austro-Hungarian census in 1911, the corpus separatum had a population of 49,608 people and was composed of the following linguistic communities:[13]

Residents of Fiume cheering D'Annunzio and his Legionari, September 1919. At the time, Fiume had 22,283 Italians (46.9% of the total population of 49,608 inhabitants).[13]

Trsat castle, south

Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary's disintegration in October 1918 during the closing weeks of World War I led to the establishment of rival Croatian-Serbian and Italian administrations in the city; both Italy and the founders of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) claimed sovereignty based on their "irredentist" ("unredeemed") ethnic populations.

10 Fiume krone provisional banknote (1920)

After a brief military occupation by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, followed by the unilateral annexation of the former Corpus Separatum by Belgrade, an international force of British, Italian, French and American troops entered the city in November 1918. Its future came under discussion at the Paris Peace Conference during the course of 1919.[14]

Location of the Free State of Fiume (1920–1924)

Adriatic Square and Adria Palace

Italy based its claim on the fact that Italians comprised the largest single nationality within the city (46.9% of the total population). Croats made up most of the remainder and were a majority in the surrounding area.[13] Andrea Ossoinack, who had been the last delegate from Fiume to the Hungarian Parliament, was admitted to the conference as a representative of Fiume, and essentially supported the Italian claims. Nevertheless, at this point the city had had for years a strong and very active Autonomist Party seeking a special independent status among nations for the multicultural Adriatic city, and which also had its delegates at the Paris peace conference, Ruggero Gotthardi.

On 10 September 1919, the Treaty of Saint-Germain was signed, declaring the Austro-Hungarian monarchy dissolved. Negotiations over the future of the city were interrupted two days later when a force of Italian nationalist irregulars led by the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio part of the population.[15] Because the Italian government, wishing to respect its international obligations, did not want to annex Fiume, D'Annunzio and the intellectuals at his side eventually established an independent state, the Italian Regency of Carnaro, a unique social experiment for the age and a revolutionary cultural experience in which various international intellectuals of diverse walks of life took part (like Osbert Sitwell, Arturo Toscanini, Henry Furst, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Harukichi Shimoi, Guglielmo Marconi, Alceste De Ambris, Whitney Warren and Léon Kochnitzky).[16]

Among the many political experiments that took place during this experience, D'Annunzio and his men undertook a first attempt to establish a movement of non-aligned nations in the so-called League of Fiume, an organisation antithetic to the Wilsonian League of Nations, which it saw as a means of perpetuating a corrupt and imperialist status quo. The organisation was aiming primarily at helping all oppressed nationalities in their struggle for political dignity and recognition, establishing links with many movements on various continents, but it never found the necessary external support and its main legacy remains today the Regency of Carnaro's recognition of Soviet Russia, the first state in the world to have done so.[17][18][19]

Fiume (Rijeka) in 1937

The Liberal Giovanni Giolitti became Premier of Italy again in June 1920; this signalled a hardening of official attitudes to D'Annunzio's coup. On 12 November, Italy and Yugoslavia concluded the Treaty of Rapallo, which envisaged Fiume becoming an independent state, the Free State of Fiume, under a government acceptable to both powers.[20] D'Annunzio's response was characteristically flamboyant and of doubtful judgment: his declaration of war against Italy invited the bombardment by Italian royal forces which led to his surrender of the city at the end of the year, after five days' resistance (known as Bloody Christmas). Italian troops freed the city from D'Annunzio's militias in the last days of December 1920.

In a subsequent democratic election the Fiuman electorate on 24 April 1921 approved the idea of a free state of Fiume-Rijeka with a Fiuman-Italo-Yugoslav consortium ownership structure for the port, giving an overwhelming victory to the independentist candidates of the Autonomist Party. Fiume became consequently a full-fledged member of the League of Nations and the ensuing election of Rijeka's first president, Riccardo Zanella, was met with official recognition and greetings from all major powers and countries worldwide. Despite many positive developments leading to the establishment of the new state's structures, the subsequent formation of a constituent assembly for the state did not put an end to strife within the city. A brief Italian nationalist seizure of power ended with the intervention of an Italian royal commissioner, and another short-lived peace was interrupted by a local Fascist putsch in March 1922 which ended with a third Italian intervention to restore the previous order. Seven months later the Kingdom of Italy itself fell under Fascist rule and Fiume's fate was therefore set, the Italian Fascist Party being among the strongest proponents of the annexation of Fiume to Italy. The Free State of Fiume thus was to officially become the first country victim of fascist expansionism.

Capuchin Church of Our Lady of Lourdes

This period of diplomatic acrimony closed with the bilateral Treaty of Rome (27 January 1924), signed by Italy and Yugoslavia. With it the two neighbouring countries were agreeing on invading and partitioning the territory of the small state. Most of the territory of the old Corpus Separatum became part of Italy, while a few northern villages of Croatian-Slovenian language were annexed by Yugoslavia.[21] The annexation happened de facto on 16 March 1924, and it inaugurated circa twenty years of Italian government for the city proper.

With the 1924 Treaty of Rome between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the two countries agreed to annex and split the territory of the Free State of Fiume between themselves.[21] The formal annexation (16 March 1924) inaugurated 19 years of Italian fascist rule and the city became the seat of the newly formed Province of Carnaro. In this period Fiume lost its commercial hinterland and thus part of its economic potential, due to it becoming a border town with little strategic importance for the Kingdom of Italy. But thanks to it retaining the Free Port status, and its iconic image in the fascist nation-building myth it gained many specific concessions from the government in Rome, a separate tax treatment from the rest of the Kingdom and a more humble than in Hungarian times, but continuous inflow of investments from the state. This could still not avoid a substantial slowing of the economic and demographic growth compared to the previous Austro-Hungarian period.

Rijeka under aerial bombardment by the Royal Air Force, 1944

Market

At the beginning of World War II Rijeka immediately found itself in an awkward position. The city was overwhelmingly Italian, but its immediate surroundings and the city of Sušak, just across the Rječina river (today a part of Rijeka proper) were inhabited almost exclusively by Croatians and part of a potentially hostile power—Yugoslavia. Once the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Croatian areas surrounding the city were occupied by the Italian military, setting the stage for an intense and bloody insurgency which would last until the end of the war. Partisan activity included guerrilla-style attacks on isolated positions or supply columns, sabotage and killings of civilians believed to be connected to the Italian and (later) German authorities. This, in turn, was met by stiff reprisals from the Italian and German military. On 14 July 1942, in reprisal for the killing of four civilians of Italian origin by the Partisans (communist-led insurgents), the Italian military killed 100 men from the suburban village of Podhum, resettling the remaining 800 people to concentration camps.[22]

After the surrender of Italy to the Allies in September 1943, Rijeka and the surrounding territories were occupied by Germany, becoming part of the Adriatic Littoral Zone. The partisan activity continued and intensified. On 30 April 1944, in the nearby village of Lipa, German troops killed 263 civilians in reprisal for the killing of several soldiers during a partisan attack.[23]

Transadria building

Because of its industries (oil refinery, torpedo factory, shipyards) and its port facilities, the city was also a target of more than 30 Anglo-American air attacks,[24] which caused widespread destruction and hundreds of civilian deaths. Some of the heaviest bombardments happened on 12 January 1944 (attack on the refinery, part of the oil campaign),[25] on 3–6 November 1944, when a series of attacks resulted in at least 125 deaths and between 15 and 25 February 1945 (200 dead, 300 wounded).[26]

The area of Rijeka was heavily fortified even before World War II (the remains of these fortifications can be seen today on the outskirts of the city). This was the fortified border between Italy and Yugoslavia which, at that time, cut across the city area and its surroundings. As Yugoslav troops approached the city in April 1945, one of the fiercest and largest battles in this area of Europe ensued. The 27,000 German and additional RSI troops fought tenaciously from behind these fortifications (renamed "Ingridstellung"—Ingrid Line—by the Germans). Under the command of the German general Ludwig Kübler they inflicted thousands of casualties on the attacking Yugoslav Partisans, which were forced by their superiors to charge uphill against well-fortified positions to the north and east of the city. The Yugoslav leaders were afriad of possible English plans to disembark in Rijeka and Istria and cut them off of the Easternmost territories of the Kingdom of Italy, which were in their plans for annexation in the war's aftermath. After an extremely bloody battle and heavy losses on the attackers side, the Germans were forced to retreat. Before leaving the city, in an act of wanton destruction (the war being almost over), the German troops destroyed much of the harbour area and other important infrastructure with explosive charges. However, the German attempt to break out of the partisan encirclement north-west of the city was unsuccessful. Of the approximately 27,000 German and other troops retreating from the city, 11,000 were killed or executed after surrendering, while the remaining 16,000 were taken as prisoners. Yugoslav troops entered Rijeka on 3 May 1945.[27][28] The city had suffered extensive damage in the war. The economic infrastructure was almost completely destroyed, and of the 5,400 buildings in the city at the time, 2,890 (53%) were either completely destroyed or heavily damaged.[29]

The Governor's Palace, Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral

Highest residential skyscrapers in Croatia

The city's fate was once again solved by a combination of force and diplomacy. Despite the insisting requests by the Fiuman government in exile collaboration with the partisans and calls to respect the city-state's internationally recognized sovereignty, and despite the generous initial promises of full independence and later of extensive autonomy for the city-state by the Yugoslav authorities (the locals were promised various degrees of autonomy at different moments during the war,most notably the possibility to be a state of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), the city was annexed by Yugoslavia and incorporated as part of the federal state of Croatia. All the many voices of dissent within the population were silenced in the 12 months following the end of the war. The situation created by the Yugoslav forces on the ground was eventually formalised by the Paris peace treaty between Italy and the Allies on 10 February 1947, despite the complaints by the last democratically-elected government and its president-in-exile Riccardo Zanella, and the attempts by experienced Italian foreign minister Carlo Sforza to uphold the previous Wilsonian plans for a multicultural Free State solution, with a local headquarters for the newly created United Nations. Once the change to Yugoslav sovereignty was formalised, and in particular in the years leading to the Trieste Crisis of 1954, fifty-eight thousand of the 66,000 inhabitants of the city were gradually pushed to either emigrate (they became known in Italian as esuli or the exiled ones from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia) or endure a harsh oppression by the new Yugoslav Communist regime during the first decades of its existence. The Yugoslav communist party opted for a very Stalinist approach in solving the local ethnic question, in particular after the Autonomist-sympathisers gained massive support in the first local elections held on the city's territory between 1945 and 1946.

The discrimination and persecution that many inhabitants experienced at the hands of the Yugoslav officials, in the last days of World War II and the first years of peace, still remain painful memories for the locals and the esuli, and somewhat of a taboo topic for Rijeka's political milieu, which is still largely denying the events.[30] Summary executions of alleged Fascists (often well-known anti-fascists or openly apolitical), aimed at hitting the local intellectual class, the Autonomists, the commercial classes, the former Italian public servants, the military officials and often also ordinary civilians (at least 650 executions of Italians took place after the end of the war[31]) eventually forced most Italophones (of various ethnicities) to leave Rijeka/Fiume in order to avoid becoming victims of a harsher retaliation. The removal was a meticulously planned operation, aimed at convincing the hardly assimilable Italian part of the autochthonous population to leave the country, as testified decades later by representatives of the Yugoslav leadership.[32]

Swimming pool complex in Kantrida

Astronomical Centre Rijeka

The most notable victims of the political and ethnic repression of locals in this period was the Fiume Autonomists purge hitting all the autonomist figures still living in the city, and now associated in the Liburnian Autonomist Movement. The Autonomists actively helped the Yugoslav partisans in liberating the region from Fascist and Nazi occupation, and, despite receiving various promises of large political autonomy for the city, they were eventually all assissinated by the Yugoslav secret police OZNA in the days leading to and following the Yugoslav army's victorious march into city. In subsequent years, the Yugoslav authorities joined the municipalities of Fiume and Sušak and, after 1954, less than one third of the original population of the now united municipalities (mostly what was previously the Croat minority in Fiume and the majority in Sušak) remained in the city, because the old municipality of Fiume lost in these years more than 85% of the original population. The Yugoslav plans for a more obedient demographical situation in RIjeka culminated in 1954 during the Trieste crisis, when the Yugoslav Communist Party rallied many local members to ruin or destroy the most notable vestiges of the Italian/Venetian language and all bilingual inscriptions in the city (which was legally granted a fully bilingual status after the occupation in 1945), eventually also 'de facto' (but not 'de jure') deleting the bilinguilism, except in a handful of selected bilingual schools and inside the Italian Community's own building.

The city was then resettled by immigrants from various parts of Yugoslavia, changing heavily the city's demographics and its linguistic structure. These years coincided also with a period of general reconstruction and new industrialization after the destruction of the war. During the period of the Yugoslav Communist administration between the 1950s and the 1980s, the city became the main port of the Federal Republic and started to grow once again, both demographically and economically, taking advantage of the newly re-established hinterland which it lacked during the Italian period, as well as the rebuilding of its traditional manufacturing industries after the war, its maritime economy and its port potential. This, paired with its rich commercial history, allowed the city to soon become the second richest (GDP per capita) district within Yugoslavia. Many of these industries and companies, being partly influenced by a socialist-planned economy and the unique Yugoslav co-operative model, and due to an often fraudulent privatisation process within the newly founded Republic of Croatia, were not able to survive the move to a full market-oriented model in the early 1990s.

As Yugoslavia broke up in 1991, the Federal State of Croatia became independent and, in the Croatian War of Independence that ensued, Rijeka became part of the newly independent Croatia. Since then, the city has stagnated economically and its demography has plunged heavily. Some of its largest industries and employers went out of business - the most prominent among them being the internationally-renowned Jugolinija shipping company, the torpedo factory, the paper mill and many other medium or small manufacturing and commercial companies, often in the midst of big corruption scandals and a badly planned privatization by the Croatian government. Other companies struggled to remain economically viable (like the city's landmark 3. Maj shipyards). The number of workers in working in production dropped from more than 80,000 in 1990 to only 5,000 two decades later. A difficult and uncertain transition of the city's economy away from manufacturing and towards the service and tourism industries is still in progress nowadays.

In 2018, it was announced that, 65 years after the abolition of Italian as the official language of the city, new Croatian-Italian bilingual signs will be placed back in the Fiume's part of the modern united municipality.[33]

In 2020, Rijeka was voted the European Capital of Culture alongside Galway,[34] with a planned programme including more than 600 events of cultural and social importance.

City government building

Lantern, a gift from the Japanese city Kawasaki to the city of Rijeka

Rijeka is twinned with: