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6: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
restoration and again acting as a memorial but now in a different capacity
to a different audience (see Chapter 5). Olivier writes that: “[l]ike memory,
archaeological material bears the mark of repetition… it is essentially the
same site which is reproduced, similar and yet different every time, because
unique at each moment in time” (Olivier 2004:210). Paths lead my feet here
just as it has allowed others to walk along it before me. Paths that stretch
across the Podyji Park but which continues, almost indefinitely through the
landscapes of the former Iron Curtain. Along its route it connects the past
and the present through those who have travelled along here before and
whose remains can still be seen along its route. On Mount Sabotin/Sabotino
the paths take me past structures from the First World War, reused by the
border guards and then by myself during a sudden shower, and the trenches
the fighters in this war have left behind in the ground; they take me past
ramblers who walk along dual paths without knowing their origin on their
way to see the remains of a 14 th century monastery which has fallen apart
over time, its ruination quickened by the destruction during the First World
War; the paths take me down along the mountain past flagpoles in which
the Slovenian flags were first raised on 25 th of June1991; they take me past
border crossings, sleepy ones partially used still and deserted ones; they take
me past the Countess Liduška’s former residence firmly located within Italy,
just the way she wanted it when she persuaded the American soldiers to
influence the establishment of the border in 1947 (see Chapter 4).
During my field surveys of my study areas I walk through the fragments
of the past and the present, all here now for me to see: paths walked by
monks, pilgrims, tourists, soldiers, landowners, border guards; bunkers; war
trenches; remains of a monastery and church; information boards and
graffiti. All fragments from the past intermingling and reactivated in the
present. Also the sources that I encounter intermingles: the pictures of poles
being hammered into the ground by Nova Gorica railway station, the way
the square outside the station building looks today and the way a cyclist
waiting for a train jumps over the former Iron Curtain, the dancers across
the border that I witnessed one evening. Or the words of Cold War division
presented in a news programme, preserved pieces of Berlin Wall, tourists
enjoying the well preserved nature of the Podyji Park, an actor on a film set
making his way through a barbed wire, a stretch of barbed wire fence in
Čižov left by chance, and double paths high up on a mountain between Italy
and Slovenia. Or barrack buildings, the writing left within them, official
reports by soldiers at the archives and the images of dead people.
Documents, objects, photos, people, accounts etc. they are all fragments that
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