On the Decline and Fall of Austro-Hungarian Naval Supremacy

I’ve wanted to visit Trieste since I was in grade 7 and I had this game called Imperialism in which you could play as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and your capital had to have access to the sea because it had to be the trading and industry hub of the empire.  Unfortunately, everything about Imperialism and how to succeed at it ran counter-current to the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s circumstances.   There was a requirement for the game that if a capital was on river, you had to have control over all the territory that the river flowed through, and if there is one thing we can all agree with when it comes to the Danube, it’s that it flows in entirely the wrong way, and if you play the 1820 scenario, then you run into a big old wall of Turkey in Europe (Turkey had so much of Europe!).  So, by default, Trieste was the capital, and apparently Trieste had quite the cachet before things got seriously bleak for it and it was handed to Italy, a nation of ports, which left Trieste as a port without a hinterland. 

So I suppose it’s no surprise that Slovenia, upon detaching itself from Austria, would have co-opted to join the trifecta of Serbs and Croats in forming the new south Slav Kingdom.  Or actually, it is a surprise.  I don’t know if you’ve been to Slovenia, but it has more right to be in the EU than any other country in the EU does.  If everyone could bring themselves up to Slovenia’s standards, we’d have a pretty successful union on our hands.  And so clean!  No one pees on the streets here.  Maybe limiting access to the Mediterranean Sea is a good thing.  

The only discernible trace of Balkanism left in Slovenia is the availability of burek on the streets, which is like the kebab of Ex-oslavia.  After doing all the things one must do in Slovenia (basically embrace nature and castles and rain), we headed to Trieste, but not before visiting some Shroedinger’s Cat of a lake that either did or did not exist, depending on the winds.  At this point in time, it did not exist, but it still technically did exist, it just wasn’t present at the moment we were there.  This is about as clear as I am willing to make things.

Yeah, Trieste was fine, but I was expecting so much more out of this wily Iron Curtain rod-hole.  Handing a major port over to a country filled with ports and cutting off access to its economic hinterland for 90 years really has its consequences.  Who knew?  So we decided that the time was nigh to head down the Adriatic coast and visit other relics of the powerful Austro-Hungarian merchant marine: Pula, the home of the fleet, which in 2010 featured a large Roman amphitheatre, lots of tour buses, and a sign warning cars to not continue driving off the dock and into the water.  No railing, just a sign asking not to*; and Rijeka, or anyone who has spent as much time in Hungary as I have, Fiume.  This was Hungary’s answer to Trieste, because anything Austria could do, Hungary could also attempt to do.  Rijeka was a lot more vibrant, which is probably because it’s currently being used as a port, and not a museum for its glory days.  I think Italy had its hands on it sometime in the 30s or 40s, but it seems to have bounced back.

*The fun with road signs didn’t end here.  Somewhere in Slovenia there was a series of switchbacks with a series of progressively dire warnings about the curves.  I believe the first one showed a motorcyclist taking a sharp turn, the second featured the motorcyclist spinning out of control, and the third featured his family at his funeral looking sad.  These were all simple stick figures, by the way.  Unfortunately there were no more switchbacks so we don’t know how the story ended with the family.