Both of my parents died less than a year before I decided to retire in Britain and move to Istria. They would be most surprised by my decision, as we had never discussed such a possibility. To tell the truth, it had never even crossed my mind while they were alive. As I kept explaining to them ever since the Yugoslav civil war broke out in the early 1990s, we were lucky to be far from the Balkans, where one could expect only the worst in the years to come. Anyhow, I have often felt sad about my parents’ ignorance of my life in Istria.

My father was not too sentimental about his childhood and youth, but my mother certainly was. She would have been delighted about my wish to live with the people she loved so much. Whenever an opportunity arose, she could not stop talking about her Istrians. She remembered them as a sweet and gentle folk. Although some of her stories did not square well with this view, she stuck to it quite tenaciously. All the miserable stories she remembered were assigned to a few bad apples, which could be found anywhere.

I can also imagine my parents’ pain upon hearing about my fate in Istria. The Fascists pushed out their families in the 1930s, and they would thus imagine that all Istrians would welcome my “return” most warmly. They would not be able to understand that anyone in Istria would ever call me a stranger, let alone a foreigner, after all the calamities they witnessed in their own days. They could not even imagine anyone trying to push me out of the land of our ancestors once again. Luckily for my parents, they both died less than a year before I decided to retire in Britain and move to Istria.