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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
Other military functions and facilities were housed in already existing
buildings. On the transalpine square where the border went right across the
square in front of what is now the Nova Gorica train station, the Italian
border police installed a head quarter in what was previously a residential
building. Photos from the late 1940s when the building was used as headquarters
show that no major changes were made to this building, at least on
the outside (Figure 31). The building has since been converted back to a
residential building and today it does not show any traces of its military
history within its fabric.
Figure 30: A Yugoslavian border
guard of the partisan of the Border
Units of the Yugoslav national
army, on guard duty on
Kostanjevica hill. Property of
Goriški Muzej, Nova Gorica,
Slovenia.
Figure 31: Headquarters of the
Italian Customs Service at the
corner of the streets of Caprin and
Percoto towards at the end of the
1940s. Two guards and a piece of
the barbed wire at the State border
between the Federative People’s
Republic of Yugoslavia and the
Republic of Italy can be seen to the
far right. Property of Musei
provinciali di Gorizia, Italy.
The physical border
When you move around in the borderland terrain it is generally fairly easy
to see where the border is with the boundary itself still clearly marked in the
terrain through white painted, concrete blocks, as in fact along many borders
across Europe. Many of these stones show signs of modification as the
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