Crossing the Mediterranean: Dalmatian El Shatt Refugees in Egypt and the Narrative of Mediterraneanism

  In 1943, 28,000 residents of Dalmatia were evacuated from their homes along the eastern Adriatic in preparation for the Allied bombings of this strategically important coastland. Like the shiploads of Jews toted from one unwelcoming port to another, Dalmatians experienced the trauma of being hauled across the Mediterranean Sea in search of asylum. Composed mostly of women, children and the elderly, these Dalmatian refugees were of Italian and Serbo-Croatian descent, of Catholic and Serb Orthodox faith, of socialist, monarchist, and uncommitted political convictions. First they were unloaded in Italy. But when food shortages and local antipathies to the new evacuees made conditions in Italian camps unbearable, the British Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA) took on the Dalmatian refugees, placing them in a patch of Egypt immediately across from the city of Suez. Inmates of this camp (named El Shatt) tried to organize their lives to resemble their homeland as much as possible. Upon the camps closing in 1946, a total of 300 marriages, 600 births, and circa 800 deaths were recorded.

   MEERA personnel,  El Shatt camp inmates, political commemorations in the immediate postwar, during Tito and Nasser’s non-alignment pact, and during today’s new interest in Mediterraneanism have provided completely different interpretations of the El Shatt experience. Some argue that it marked a time when Dalmatians were abandoned to their fate by the Great Powers, left isolated on the sandy deserts of a foreign and faraway Egypt. Others hailed that it served as a prime example of the “privileged nature of the links forged by neighbourhood and history” along the shores of the greater Mediterranean. This paper examines the El Shatt episode and its many commemorations to determine to what extent an intimate Adriatic world was capable of embracing — or being embraced by — larger global currents.