engleski

Materializing departure: competing practices of emigrant accommodation in Trieste and Rijeka at the turn of the 19th century

In the late nineteenth century, the cities of Rijeka and Trieste were focal points of extra- continental emigration flows departing from the Austro- Hungarian Monarchy. Despite the ambiguous dispositions of the State towards emigration, the construction of the railway - first the Austrian Southern Railways section, Oesterreichische Südbahn, which connected Trieste to Vienna (1857), followed by the railway line from Rijeka to Budapest and Vienna (1873) - enabled and supported the development of the two harbours and their navigation routes. Both ports, where each year more than 25000 people embarked on a transcontinental journey, became sites of relentless competition for primacy between English and German shipping companies, made visible in many contemporary local newspaper articles and ads. Due to specific administrative and political agreements which upheld the constitutional union of the Dual Monarchy, the Hungarian government legally obligated emigrants arriving from Transleithania, i.e. lands of the Hungarian crown, to travel from Rijeka, while Trieste became the main departure point for inhabitants of Cisleithania, the northern and western part of Austria-Hungary. Hence, due to the lack of a centrally organised accommodation system, different sets of practices developed in the two cities. The aim of this paper is to analyse the potential differences between two sets of practices of immigrant accommodation, incorporated into the development of the local infrastructure around the ports and across the urban settings of Rijeka and Trieste. Hence, we will focus on the role played by the location, architectural organisation and aesthetic practices built into these structures in accommodating and organising immigrants waiting for their departure. By taking infrastructures as the object of analysis we seek to investigate networks and the new social collectivities they enabled, as well as how people experienced this “in- between space” and (re)created its multiple meanings through everyday practices.

transatlantic migrations, accommodation practices, infrastructure, Rijeka, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

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