The story of a unique Italo-Slovenian community which came to be united by the same border that used to divide it
One of the saddest sights is that of an Italian town in lockdown...
It is an early Saturday afternoon in March 2020, and I am the only pedestrian in a sun-lit cobbled street in the centre of Gorizia, an ancient border town in north-eastern Italy, a former provincial capital, now paired with the Slovenian town of Nova Gorica on the other side of the state frontier to create a peculiar bi-national metropolis – a jointly administered trans-border conurbation Gorizia/Nova Gorica.
Via Roma, normally resonating with loud, yet peaceful and amicable, buzz of an Italian crowd, feels gagged, and my solitary footsteps echo bluntly in the silent, as if comatose, Art Nouveau facades…
In Gorizia/Nova Gorica, the normally invisible state border runs across roads and lanes. It dissects the railway station plaza, now called Europe Square, from where both Italian and Slovenian streets radiate. It is habitual therefore for the Gorizia dwellers to dash 'across the street' for a drink of a cheaper Slovenian beer, and for the Slovenes to pop over to Italy for a cuppa of a hugely superior espresso.
… I visited Gorizia/Nova Gorica early last March – at the truly unique historical moment, when the border – totally open and all but imaginary since December 2007, when Slovenia joined the Schengen Area - became real and visible again, for the first time in 13 years!
With Italy already deep in lockdown, Slovenia was still practically unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic, with zero Coronavirus-related deaths and just a few positive tests in Ljubljana, the capital, about 50 miles away. It was a bizarre and sinister sight: the Slovenian part of the town lively and full of people, and its Italian half – semi-deserted. And just a week after my departure, due to the quickly spreading pandemic, the Slovenian-Italian border inside the town had to be closed entirely– with fences, concrete blocks and barbed wire reappearing overnight at all designated crossings for the first time since the 1970s – a gruesome throwback to the times of the Cold War, when they were separating Marshal Tito's Communist Yugoslavia (of which Slovenia was a federal part) from the Western world.
My Nova Gorica contacts, who still remembered the Cold War era, reported watching in disbelief the return of the guarded checkpoints, through which only the key workers were allowed to pass, in the town's streets and squares.
The global pandemic was probably the only force in the world capable of restoring the Cold War borders, even if for a relatively short while, thus temporarily re-introducing the divide between Gorizia and Nova Gorica, which by then had merged to the point of running together for the title of the European Capital of Culture 2025 - the first and so far only case in history when two urban communities from two different countries strived to become one-and-the-same cross-border 'capital'!
Smuggling across the Square
With my Slovenian escort David Kozuh, a local historian and the Curator of the regional museum, we are standing next to each other in the middle of Europe Square – a living symbol of the town's present-day unity. We are both on the Slovenian side, where social distancing is not yet in force. I make a small step to the right – and bingo: I am in Italy, and Mr Kozuhnow has to keep two metres away from me...
On the Slovenian side, the Square is dominated by the Nova Gorica railway station, built in 1906 as the Gorizia station of the Bohinj railway, crucial for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Gorizia was then a part. Yes, local history here can be complicated, and that is why is it great to have a knowledgeable historian as my guide.
Mr Kozuh explains that the station building became part of Yugoslavia in September 1947, when the Square was divided in two parts in accordance with the February 1947 Paris Peace Treaty. The station entrance was just 38 metres away from the border. Until 1954, the square had been dissected along the frontier line by several barbed wire rows, later supplemented with a concrete fence. All those barriers were partially removed in 2004 and taken away completely in 2011.
The history of that Italian-Slovenian divide was far less sinister than that of the Berlin Wall, and yet hundreds of people, mostly from the Yugoslavian side, were killed and injured trying to cross over the border illegally, particularly in the first several years of its existence, between 1947 and 1950.
Then of course there were smugglers.
Here it is important to note that Tito's Yugoslavia, or the Yugoslav Federal People's Republic (FLRJ), as it was officially known, was much better off in terms of material well-being that any other country of the former communist block (in the Soviet Union, where I grew up, it was as hard to get a permission to travel to Yugoslavia as to the USA, or other 'capitalist' countries). And yet, the gap in the living standards with neighbouring Italy was striking – to the point when the few lucky Slovenes, officially allowed to travel across the border, made sure they carried substantial amounts of the locally made produce: meat, honey, wine etc. – and brought back manufactured goods: cameras, radios, household items and later - electronics.
"Smuggling was a way of life here, with no stigma attached to it," explains Kozuh. So wide-spread it was that at some point the Belgrade government had to make provisions for the Gorizia border to be guarded exclusively by the supposedly incorruptible soldiers from Serbia, another Yugoslavian republic, who had no connections with the locals and were therefore harder to bribe! Kozuh's own granny used to smuggle out rabbit meat, tied to her body, and bring back such coveted Italian goods as chocolate, coffee and brooms.
"Brooms?" I ask him in disbelief.
"Yes, indeed, ordinary sorghum brooms, which were in short supply in the communist Yugoslavia, like many other basic household goods," he smiles.
Those hard-to-obtain brooms swept their way into history when in August 1950 a crowd of nearly 5000 Slovenes illegally crossed the border in protest against the check-point's temporary closure which left them unable to stock up on some basic necessities they had run out of. The crowds stopped short of trespassing, but staged a peaceful demonstration on the neutral land between the two check-points – Slovenian and Italian – and many of them were waving their old worn-out brooms. That impromptu gathering became known as The March of the Brooms, or The Brooms Sunday.
Those times are firmly in the past. With both Italy and Slovenia (which declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991) being the EU members, there are no more shortages of foods and consumer goods in either country (even if such basics as petrol or beer remain cheaper in Slovenia). And yet, some people on both sides of the non-existing fence still tend to slightly romanticise the old way of life, of which smuggling was an important part.
"Border mentality has always been in our psyche," Anja Medved, Slovenian writer and filmmaker, told me in a Nova Gorica bar. "We always looked at the West with a longing, and when the border went, its disappearance reverberated in my soul which used to thrive on the uncertainty. At times, I have a feeling that it is still there, that it is the world that has changed, but the border remains. To me, it is not a geopolitical concept, but a category of the mind. And wasn't it great to be twelve and on a bike and on your own – riding to a different world?"
Anja grew up in the 1980s when the borders between the 'socialist' Yugoslavia and the West were all but open (unlike his Soviet counterparts, Marshal Tito decided to grant the right to travel to all his politically oppressed subjects in exchange for loyalty), and the Yugoslav citizens, including Slovenians, were free to live and work anywhere in the world. For someone like myself, however, who had felt tremendously claustrophobic and entrapped in the world's largest cage of the former USSR, it was hard to share Anja's nostalgia for the borders...
The town with two faces
I visited the HQ of EGTC-GO, the Gorizia branch of the European Grouping of Territorial Co-Operation, literally hours before it too succumbed to lockdown. Unlike some other EU-supported organisations, designed to 'facilitate cross-border co-operation', but in reality bureaucratising it even further, EGTC-GO was established in 2009 by both municipalities as a tool to overcome the numerous bureaucratic obstacles to joint projects and initiatives.
EGTC-GO staff do not waste their time and budgets on parades, festivals and other public manifestations of cross-border solidarity. Its director, Dr Ivan Curzolo, spoke to me about the importance of such down-to-earth issues as joint waste collection and cross-border ambulance services serving both communities equally rather than being disrupted by all sorts of bureaucratic regulations. One of the organisation's significant achievements was that women from the Slovenian community could now give birth in Italy, the country with higher midwifery standards, .if they so wished. I found that particular fact reassuring: it was like building a firm foundation for the area's borderless future.
Not everything in the cross-border relations is good and bright, and Dr. Curzolo claimed that his organisation's initiatives have yet to find support in the respective national capitals, refusing to put up with diversity.
I could not help overhearing notes of dissatisfaction when speaking with Aldo Rudel, a Gorizia-based Slovenian writer, translator and former teacher, who volunteered to show me around his Italian town, described in my vintage '1905 Baedeker's Austria-Hungary as "the capital of a province, charmingly situated on the Isonzo [River] and frequented as a winter resort".
We started in the central square, known as Travnik ('Meadow') in Slovenian and Piazza della Vittoria (Victory Square)in Italian, where Mussolini spoke twice - in 1938 and 1942.
Rudel pointed at a billboard with the town map and the legend in both Italian and Slovenian. The Slovenian part of the legend was sprayed with black ink to the point of being unreadable.
"Someone keeps stubbornly desecrating this map," complained Rudel. "We clean it up – and overnight they do it again!"
He lamented some anti-Slovenian attitudes in Gorizia which, in his words, have resulted in ethnic Slovenes being underrepresented in the local government bodies. His other complaint was of the lack of Slovenian street signs. Here I have to say that I hadn't spotted many Italian signs in the town's Slovenian part – Nova Gorica – either.
Of course, not everything looks and feels the same in Gorizia and in Nova Gorica, and, frankly, my hope is that they will forever remain parts of one-and-the-same border town, with two distinctly different faces.
When Le Corbusier went to the casino
My very first impression of Nova Gorica, the modernistic Slovenian part of the Gorizia conurbation, was that I had been there before, albeit I certainly hadn't.
Architecturally, that 'planned community', built after WWII on the orders of Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892 – 1980), Yugoslavia's communist leader, struck me as a cross between Minsk and Stevenage, with a touch of Le Corbusier's brutalist 'Living Machine', inside which I once stayed in Marseilles. The latter association was actually quite relevant, for Nova Gorica was designed and built under the supervision of the Slovenian architect Edo Ravnikar – Le Corbusier's disciple and keen follower.
A special committee to organise the construction of a new Slovenian town on the Italian border was set up in April 1947 following the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty, and he first groups of workers started arriving to the site shortly after that - in October 1947. They were followed by the so-called 'youth work brigades' - volunteers from all over Yugoslavia.
Alas, orders from the top, combined with compulsive 'socialist planning' and a touch of enthusiasm, were not sufficient for the project's success. Ten years after the town's foundation, Slovenian geographer Igor Vriser wrote: "Despite huge efforts, Nova Gorica is still only a half-built town paralysed by territorial division, deficient in economic resources, with a housing problem, unfinished municipal services etc."
It was not until 1980 that, according to a survey, the town "has taken a significant step forward". That was largely due to the decision – in stark contradiction to the 'communist principles' – to open several large casinos, in which the locals were not allowed to gamble. According to a1988 Yugoslavian guide to Nova Gorica, "The proximity of the border is stimulating the growth of business in the hotel industry, and the Casino is now one of the features available to visitors from abroad (sic -VV)."
Indeed, the large Soviet-style hotel, where I stayed, was part of an even larger casino, semi-empty because of the Covid-19. The locals were no longer banned from gambling, but not too many seemed interested. The remaining punters were mostly confused and uncharacteristically taciturn Italians, caught unawares by the pandemic and either unable or unwilling to return to their country.
With David Kozuh, we took a stroll around the town, which, just like most of the 1970s-80s urban developments in the Soviet Union, had no obvious 'centre', but just rows of high-rise housing blocks, hastily constructed from grey prefab panels, with standard-shaped balconies. I was pleasantly surprised, however, by the proliferation of small green spaces, with fountains, flower beds and tasteful modern sculptures, nestling casually among all those concrete monoliths – a welcome post-communist addition to the otherwise unimpressive and drab townscape, so different from that of its much older sister town across the Italian border.
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As a keen linguist, I was happy to find out that among the various cross-border initiatives overseen by the Gorizia-based EGTC-GO was 'mutual language learning', i.e. helping Slovenians to study Italian, and Italians – to come to grips with Slovenian. And here's a small lesson of the latter unlike most of other Slavic tongues, Slovenian possesses the so-called "dual grammatical form", or "the dual number". Whereas most languages are happy with just a singular and a plural, Slovenian has a special way of saying "just the two of us" – "midva". It is often used in relation to newly married couples – two individuals, joined together to create one new entity.
That nicely-sounding pronoun – 'midva', 'the two of us' - alone can pass for an adequate, if super-laconic, description of Gorizia/Nova Gorica – two border towns that have merged together to form one new identity of their own.
Photographs by Christine Bohling
PANELS:
1.The Vipava Valley
The Vipava Valley is situated in the Slovenian Littoral, roughly between the village of Podnanos to the east and the border with Italy to the west. It incorporates Gorizia plane which surrounds Goricia/Nova Gorica. The Valley is dotted with hills and mounds ('Gora' and 'Gorica' mean 'mountain' and 'hillock' in Slovenian) which often feature terraced vineyards, with adjoining 'wine villages'. It is one of the main wine-growing areas of Slovenia, where vines have been continuously cultivated from the times of the Roman Empire. The main grape varieties grown are Rebula, Chanot Blanc, Malvazija and Laski Rizling. The Valley's mild Mediterranean climate, with plenty of sun and just enough of rainfall, successfully defies the dry and cold Burja (or bora) winds blowing form the mountain peaks, making it ideal for vine-growing. The Valley is also known for its fruit: peaches, cherries, figs, apricots and persimmons (or kakis).The Vipava River, running through the Valley, has the only inverted delta in Europe, and the viaduct over the Soca River is thought to have the world's longest stone arch. The Vipava Valley village of Podnanos was the birthplace of Stanko Premrl, the composer who created "Zdravljica" – Slovenia's national anthem.
2.Konstanjevica Hill – the grave of the last king of France
With no royalty of their own in either Slovenia or Italy, there's still a king whom both Slovenians and Italians from the Gorizia region would happily call their own – the last French monarch Charles X, buried in the crypt of a small church of the Franciscan Monastery on top of Konstanjevica Hill in Nova Gorica.
Entombed there with him are five of his family members and one courtier. To avoid the tragic fate of his predecessor, King Louis XVI, beheaded in 1793, Charles X had to flee from France in 1830 thus ending more than 300 years of the Bourbon Dynasty rule.
After a short stopover in Edinburgh, the King and his 100-strong entourage left for Prague. In 1836, in an attempt to escape the piercing cold of the Prague winter and on the invitation of Count Coronini, Charles X headed for Gorizia, which due to its mild climate, was known as 'the Austrian Nice' (it was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). But, sadly, after just 17 days there, the 79-year-old Charles died of cholera and thus became the only French king to be buried outside France.
Befittingly, the monastery garden contains Europe's second largest collection of the Bourbon Roses.
Useful links
www.slovenia.info