For centuries, the Navy inciting the imagination of boys induced vivid tales of sailors on the high seas and countries that have won, new, unseen species of animals, beautiful women and all kinds of world wonders about where they would talk long into the night.
For centuries, mothers and wives were mourning their sons and husbands which they would never see again.
What is now just a romantic story, once it was bitter reality. They were conquerors or veterans, sailors or officers, old or young, all of them in front of them constantly had at least two enemies. First, smaller, opponents who used the knowledge and skills to defeat them and of itself eliminate the hazard, making it with the unwritten rules of conduct and chivalry, and another, much stronger, as a force of nature and the sea that descended on them by unequaled power, power of million tons.
Those who survived and told stories often carried with them a fraction of their misery, a souvenir from a distant and difficult journey, the memory of dear friends who have lost their lives or of the ship on which they so faithfully served.
Years went by, people with them, and witnessed history remained forgotten by the old chests and cupboards, drawers and basements, in glass cases and in the old books.
Memories, however, to those glorious times, though faded still not completely disappeared, but the same old story even now fuel the imagination of a special kind of people who diligently collect data and information, learn about the history of the human race and collect artifacts of the past.
We call them collectors.
Dozens, perhaps even hundreds of millions of people around the world gather some items that they occupy attention. Philately, numismatics, various utility items, old furniture, clocks and jewelry are just part of the themes that occupy the minds of collectors.
Special varieties among them are collectors of militaria.
Uniforms, hats, firearms and cold weapons, medals and tags, old maps and documents are only part of a whole series of cases around the world which gather in large and small collections. Some collect only one type of objects, such as swords, others only locally found objects, and third items associated with a particular unit. Large national museums expertly and professionally preserved collections of historical items available to the public, and private collectors collect for their personal satisfaction. Both are investing tremendous effort, time and resources in the process of collecting items and learning about them by using all available information, books and the Internet, specialized fairs and contacts with fellow collectors to acquire the necessary knowledge about the subject that preoccupies them.
A special part of the learning, perhaps in line with the personal experience and of a crucial importance as a source of information are the books that deal with specific subjects and history, which in a detailed way explain various items, models and variations of objects but also short but very important anecdotes of life in the period from which these objects originate.
When I first started thinking about this page, I took the idea that eluded me for some time and that was based on the daily scrolling through dozens of books in which I found and identified some items that were of my interest.
Shortly after that I began to realize that I'm just the one who should pour in the reference material of accumulated knowledge in order to, on the one hand, help collectors and allow to get just what I was looking for so many times, and on the other hand to afford the wider audience interested an entry into the wonderful world history, heroic deeds and sea battles, but also in the world of human bitter fate and suffering.
This web page is my attempt to agree between the lines of important part of the modern history of the Adriatic on one side and the world of the old masters, on the other hand, both the intertwined stories and articles related to the naval forces that sailed on the Adriatic Sea from the early 19th until the mid-20th century.
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