Abstract
This paper deals with a question of the social and cultural life of Italian evacuees from Trentino during their temporary stay in the municipalities in Bohemia in the years 1915-1919. As a result of the war conflicts in the southern front, especially as Italy entered the war in May 1915, several new founded camps in Lower Austria, Styria and municipalities in Bohemia and Moravia became temporary asylum for Austro-Hungarian Italian evacuees from the region of Trentino.
According the reports of Austrian Ministry of Interior in March 1917, among of 34 0000 civilians of total number of 70 000 Trentino evacuees in Cisleithania were placed in Bohemia and Moravia (about 16 000 in Bohemia and 18 000 in Moravia). This analysis aims to reflect main points of Austro-Hungarian refugee politics in the sphere of cultural, religious and educational care of needs of refugees by state and local authorities or refugee committees.
Austrian Ministry of Interior in the cooperation with political and district offices made effort to facilitate the integration process by the instructions of conditions of maintenance general support. It included the financial benefits, social and health care and ensuring for equal accommodation.
Therefore the state orders exhorted all refugees to reflect job opportunities and their children to attend local schools. We also try to deal with the question of the social interaction between newly assigned displaced persons and local communities in the places of temporary asylum.
A daily life of this unusual coexistence, especially in the view of ego-documents or chronicles, seems to be strongly determined by confessional and cultural affinities, rather than languages conditions, as it seems to be in the general comparison between the integration of refugees and displaced persons from e. g. Galicia (in the total number of 150 000 of Jewish and non-jewish refugees in Bohemian camps and municipalities in January 1915) and Trentino.
However, social attitudes of resident population to refugees in the daily interaction were determined by many external factors, especially by the circumstances of war development, as well as the changing official policy or populist issues in the public sphere. As for the process of integration, this paper pays attention to the particular elements everydayness of Italian diaspora with emphasis on cultural, educational and religious aspects, as well as the relationship between the refugees and the resident population in the micro perspective on the examples of selected districts in Bohemia and Moravia.
The results of this study reflect a research based on the primary sources of Czech, Austrian and Italian provenance (administrative records of district funds, documents of Ministry of Interior in Vienna, chronicles and daily press, as well as ego-documents).