Seeds of Fascism: Century-Old Soiled Hanky Could Enable Cloning of Carnaro Regency’s Tin-Pot Dictator-Prince

Sometimes there’s a theme in a week’s minor news stories, and this week it seems to be: the mislaid spermatazoa of flamboyantly (even specifically upward-turning!) mustachioed Mediterranean fascist-sympathizing bohemian egomaniacs.  First, there was the news that one Pilar Abel, a 58-year-old Spaniard, was filing a paternity suit against the estate of Salvador Dalí, claiming the bombastic Catalan surrealist painter had had an affair with her mother while he was married to Gala Diakonova Éluard Dalí, his Tatarstan-born Russo-Spanish muse.  Of course, the case will get tossed right out; after all, she looks nothing like him:

And now there is the news that police in Italy have used a semen-stained handkerchief to map the genome of Gabriele d’Annunzio, an Italian poet, playwright, and ennobled prince who founded his own authoritarian micronation of sorts, the Regency of Carnaro, in 1919, and styled himself “il Duce” (“the Leader”) in anticipation of the eventual rise of Benito Mussolini.  The aristocratic snail tracks were sent, in 1916, to Countess Olga Levi Brunner, d’Annunzio’s mistress, and were preserved for most of a century in a private collection in Cagliari, Sardinia.  The hanky is now housed with other Annunziana at the Vittoriale degli Italiani (“Shrine of Italian Victories”) museum at his the prince’s former home on Lake Garda in Lombardy.

Gabriele d’Annunzio, Prince of Montenevoso

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Kingdom of Italy and the fledgling Kingdom of Yugoslavia were still squabbling over where their final border would be.  D’Annunzio, a wildly popular poet and war hero, in 1919 marched a makeshift army into Fiume—a then-Italian-populated town which today is on the Croatia side of the border and named Rijeka—and claimed it for Italy.  Italy’s King Victor Immanuel III, however, wanted no part of the plot and declined to formally reabsorb the enclave.  So d’Annunzio—an androgynous and wildly prolific bisexual erotic conqueror who followed the Italian art movement called Decadentism and whose megalomaniacal nicknames for himself included “il Magnifico” (“the Magnificent”) and “il Profeto” (“the Prophet”)—declared the town the Regency of Carnaro (Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro) and ran it as his de facto–independent personal fief for a year before the Italian navy retook the town.  Carnaro’s bizarre constitution, which was a piece of performance art in itself, declared “music” to be the founding political principle of the state, but d’Annunzio’s bombastic balcony speeches and black-shirted militias anticipated—some would say laid the groundwork for—the capital-F Fascism which later, in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, swallowed up Italy and half of Europe.  (Carnaro was later known as the Free State of Fiume (Stato Libero di Fiume) and in 1924 was formally attached to Italy.  After the Second World War, despite an attempt to revive the Carnaro entity, it reverted to Yugoslavian control.)

Olga Brunner, the prince’s mistress.
She’d better wait till the maid leaves the room before opening the mail.

Two years after Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 and began gently bending the monarchy to his will, Victor Immanuel III ennobled d’Annunzio as “Prince of Montenevoso”—the geographical principality in question being an Alpine town and district then within Italy but now known as Snežnik, in the Republic of Slovenia.

Poor Prince Gabriele: before the age of smartphones and “sexting,”
little ... um ... presents had to be sent through the royal mails.

D’Annunzio’s semen and its DNA are being used for comparison with his great-grandson Federico d’Annunzio, the current Prince of Montenevoso (Italy, a republic, nonetheless retains a semi-official aristocracy), and all press reports indicate that it is a test run for forensic genomics that does not rely on exhumation.  Though one wonders if something else is going on.  A succession dispute or paternity case?

In the waning days of the Second World War, a second try
at an independent Carnaro also claimed some now-Croatian islands in the Adriatic.

Indeed, the chief of the museum which owns the crusty rag, Giordano Bruno Guerri, raised, in an interview, the specter of a kind of small-scale version of The Boys from Brazil, musing that theoretically the poet, whom Italians regard as ambivalent sort of national hero and who died in 1938, could now be cloned.  “Nobody wants to clone d’Annunzio,” Guerri hastily clarified, “but nobody knows what changes will take place in science and society.  It’s good the DNA has been collected.”  Hmm, hard to know where he’s going with that.  If Guerri is planning to clone and breed a Decadentist pro-Fascist aristocracy to wrest control of Italy from corrupt republican politicos and imperialist Teutonic creditors, then where will it end?  We may have to swipe Monica Lewinsky’s dress from the Department of Justice’s evidence vault and clone an army of Bill Clintons to stop him.  Who’s in?

[You can read more about the Free State of Fiume, the Regency of Carnaro, and other bizarre and obscure separatist movements in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Is Ikaria Flying Too Close to the Sun? A Greek Islet Keen to Join Austria Should Be Careful What It Wishes for

The chap does look a tad Aryan, doesn’t he?

While the European Union (E.U.) and the financial world and Greeks themselves ponder the question of whether the Hellenic Republic (i.e., Greece) could—or should or will—leave the Eurozone, one part of Greece is answering the question in an unexpected way.  It also raises another question: is there any way that Mediterranean beaches could become even more polluted with Germans and Austrian sunbathers?  I’ll explain ...

The location of Ikaria, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey

Ikaria (also spelled Icaria), an island off the Turkish coast of Asia Minor but part of Greece—and the mythic home of Daedalus and Icarus, hence its name—is openly pondering whether to resolve some left over business from half-forgotten nineteenth-century wars between no-longer-existing states and apply to join the Republic of Austria.  Ikaria was absorbed in 1521 into the Ottoman Empire—from which it tried but failed to secede during the Greek War of Independence in 1827.  (See my blog article which includes a profile of the Greek independence heroine Laskarina Bouboulina as one of “The World’s 21 Sexiest Separatists.”)  Along with Crete, Ikaria was one of the Greek-populated areas excluded from the independent Kingdom of Greece founded that year with the backing of France, the United Kingdom, the Russian Empire, and others.  During the First Balkan War, in 1912-1913, Ikaria expelled Turkish troops and established itself as an independent state.

George Spanos of Evdilos, hero of the expulsion of the Ottoman Turks from Ikaria in 1912

The Free State of Ikaria existed only from July 1912 to November 1912, when it was made part of the Kingdom of Greece.  During the Greek Civil War of 1945-1947, Ikaria was a redoubt of Communist forces and is still a bastion of support for the Communist Party of Greece (K.K.E.), earning it the nickname Red Ikaria.  Now the 100-year agreement between the Kingdom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire on the status of Ikaria is set to expire, and Ikarians are considering a referendum on whether to join, of all countries, Austria.

Flag of the Free State of Ikaria

Why Austria?  Well, there is no real logic to it, except that both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire were on the same losing side of the First World War, in 1918, and of course the 9,000 inhabitants of Ikaria would never consent to being part of the Republic of Turkey.  More to the point, though: last year the president of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber (W.K.Ö.), Christoph Leitl, made a controversial, half-joking suggestion that Greece, as the economic basket case widely viewed by central and northern Europeans as having caused the financial crisis, could sell some of its islands to Turkey in order to bail itself out of trouble, rather than expecting the E.U.’s richer nations to do so.  (See my article on Umberto Bossi’s idea of Greater Padania as another absurd expression of this northern attitude.)

Austrian xenophobe Christoph Leitl

We can only hope that the bowel movement being attempted

in this candid photo was a successful one.

So the latest Ikarian proposal, surely half-joking as well, is a thumb in the eye of Austria’s famously xenophobic political establishment.

Ikaria’s mayor, Stafrinadis Christodoulos, was quoted this week in Die Welt, a newspaper in Germany, saying, “The government has forgotten us years ago.  If one cannot assure us new roads and a hospital, we may decide to break away from Athens.  It is difficult for us to remain independent.  But we could demand the annexation to another country.  Of course, not to Turkey, better to Austria.”  It is not yet clear how many Ikarians favor the idea, but the Greek government issued a furious statement to the media on July 17th, reiterating that all the Greek islands along the Asia Minor coast, which it has always seen as militarily vulnerable, were sanctified as Greek territory in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.  In Austria, on the other hand, the idea is polling with an 83% thumbs-up.

It would be their first warm-water port since they lost Dubrovnik in 1918.

How much the Greek economy worsens between now and the treaty’s November 2012 expiration date may determine how seriously the idea may eventually get taken. 

Nearly paradise.  All it needs is a few bierkellers and bratwurst stands.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]