Gorizia / Nova Gorica will nothing mean to you, but for me it are places which has a meaning in history. Gorizia is in Italy and Nova Gorica is in Slovenia. Once Winston Churchill sad on the 5th March 1946: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “iron curtain” has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow” (source Wikipedia) .
That ” iron curtain” I crossed today and it is strange: the border at the station of Nova Gorica is in Slovenia , but the square in front is in Italy: this was until 2007 a Schengen border and untill Slovenia’s independence part of the Iron curtain. Actually it was not really a really ” iron curtain” , because Yugoslavs were free to travel, much more free then the rest of ” the communist block”, but here you could not cross the border as I did today. I tried to find more about this border section, but there are not a lot sources on the internet about it, they only thing I found is this on Wikipedia, (click here) .
People can say everything about Europe, but this is a very positive point, thanks to the European Union: open borders…. Maybe we in the West do not realize the meaning of open orders, we even disagree with it, but from here on people realize much more and more the value of open borders, as I do.
So now I am in Slovenia and tomorrow I will start to climb Triglav, with 2864 meter above sea level the highest mountain of Slovenia, but also from all ex-Yugoslavia. Let my ” od Triglava do Vardara ” trip start 🙂
So here piazza del Transalpine (Italian name) / Trg Evropa (Slovenia name) as it is today:
