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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
and I meet with Maria and Antonio in Trieste. When I meet Maria she
brings along her friend Antonio. They are both Italian and in their 40s.
They are both ‘Triestini’ and know the area well as they were brought up
here and they take me to a recreational area near the Slovenian border, on
the Carso/Karst, not too far from the town. Their families have very
different backgrounds and I notice how that has affected how they speak
and think about the border and about Yugoslavia. Maria’s family moved
here before she was born and although she feels a strong connection with
the area she claims not to have the ‘hang ups’ that she suggests Antonio and
many others with a long history connected to the border have. His family
had a large farm in what is now Croatia but after World War II they lost
everything when they left it all behind and moved to Trieste. He remembers
going to visit family in Croatia in the 1960s. “It was about 100 km to get to
the town and we only met three cars. It was so poor in Yugoslavia that they
did not have cars. Also if you drove in the night it was completely black as
there were no streetlights. We brought sugar, spaghetti and coffee with us.
They had nothing” (Maria and Antonio 2008 pers. comm. 5 th September).
Maria’s memories about the border are more connected to crossing it in
order to buy cheaper food or for example jewellery that was a bit different
from what you could buy in Italy. She remembers how their car was always
searched when they crossed the border in order to check how much goods
they were taking with them. After Slovenia’s independence however the
situation changed, she says: “when capitalism came into these places it was
no longer cheap for us, and there were no good things to buy. The shops
were empty so we stopped to go [sic]” (Maria and Antonio 2008 pers.
comm. 5 th September 2008).
Maria’s story, as well as Anja’s mentioned above, is not unusual and
often told on both sides of the border. This demonstrates that as well as
being a divider the border also presented opportunities. People had different
relationships with the border. Often people who were affected by the
border had to work out a way to relate to it. For example when we walk in
the border area of the Carso/Karso, Antonio tells me how people walking
on the Italian side sometimes accidently crossed over into Yugoslavia and
got caught and questioned by the Yugoslavian border police. He starts
laughing and tells me the story of a man who lived near the border here.
One day one of his chickens ran away and crossed the border. The man ran
after him and was arrested by the Yugoslavian police and put in prison for a
while. The fate of the chicken is not explained in the story. Maybe the
Yugoslavian authorities were more tolerant towards animals. Similar stories
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