Border fence gives way to rose bushes

GORIZIA, Italy — Guns and roses define this town’s postwar history.

The guns — and the border guards who toted them — are now only a memory. So is the Iron Curtain that split Gorizia between Italy and Yugoslavia after World War II.

Fifty-seven years later, the border is hard to spot — just worn stone markers, a thin iron fence, or a fading white line on a house that straddled the frontier.

Yugoslavia has vanished, and the country across the border is now Slovenia. Next to disappear will be the fence, which is being replaced by rose bushes on May 1, when Slovenia and nine other mostly ex-communist newcomers join the European Union.

Gorizia and its Slovenian side, Nova Gorica, will be awash in street festivals, and are sending a joint team to compete in a soccer tournament pitting new and old EU members against each other.

“We have to overcome the divisions of the past, but I’m not worried,” said Vittorio Brancati, Gorizia’s Italian mayor. “We — both of us — are open peoples, with a multicultural tradition.”

Gorizians and Goricans aren’t alone.

Come May 1, flags will fly and bands will oompah in Germany and Poland, Austria and the Czech Republic and elsewhere as a handful of border towns and villages reunite after decades of separation.

In Gorizia’s case, the boundary drawn by the Allies on Feb. 10, 1947, probably did some initial good. Atrocities during and immediately after World War II by Italian fascists, then by Slovene partisans had poisoned relations.

But for many, the new border exacerbated the pain.

Parents were split from their children. A wife visiting her parents found herself unable to return to her husband on what was suddenly the Slovene side. The border arbitrarily put living rooms in Italy and kitchens in Slovenia.

“The border that was finally decided on had no consideration for the people,” recalled Martino Michele, Gorizia’s former mayor. “It separated cows in the fields from their barns. It cut through graveyards. It even bisected individual graves.”

Overnight, the border had become an ideological front line between Italy in the Western camp, and communist Yugoslavia, complete with barbed wire, guard towers and troops.

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