Film director Anja Medav has started living for a long time on her grandmother’s pain, which was separated from her family when in 1947 after World War II, the border between Italy and then Yugoslavia was drawn.
The 56 -year -old told AFP, “Seema was always present in my life, but I did not see that it is negative. It was completely different for my grandmother … which was shocked.”
Today, the border has almost disappeared, and on both sides of the frontier, two towns are now joint holders of this year’s title of the European culture capital.
Cooperating, two cities are quite different.
Italy’s Gorizia was founded more than 1,000 years ago and the sports characteristic of the Cobble-Stone Lane, while only beyond railway tracks, which mark the boundary, Nova Gorika in Slovenia has wide roads with several trees and parks in Nova Gorika.
The Yugoslav authorities decided to build a Nova Gorika as a symbol of the strength of the communist system in 1948 and were left to Italy to reduce any resentment on Gorizia.
But the future of the city changed when Slovenia broke from Yugoslavia in 1991 and joined the European Union in 2004.
Twenty years later, some 400 programs from Saturday will mark the cities of Europe’s cultural capital 2025.
Under the slogan, under the “Go Borderless”, the project aims to resume “challenging history”, but “shifting boundaries in our head”, Chief Coordinator Maja Lorbeck told AFP.
He said that this is the first time that two cities of two countries of the European Union are jointly hosting the capital of culture, which features artists such as Medava.
“The boundaries have to be removed … the good thing of the boundaries is that they invite you to see them,” said Medveda.
When Medweed Nova grew up in Gorika, it was already possible to cross the border with a pass, the residents of the 1960s were distributed to the residents of both sides to restore family relations.
“You can ride your bicycle into a completely different world with a different smell, colors where different, public buses were different in Italy and green in Yugoslavia,” Medveda recalled .
“And the feeling of having such a different world in your hand reach, contradictoryly, gave you a strong sense of freedom,” he said.
It was particularly contrary to her grandmother’s experience that was born in Gorizia, but she moved to a village outside the city when she got married.
When the border was drawn, it not only cuts through some yards, grape gardens and fields, but also “apathy” to the grandmother’s grandmother and “fully different world compared to his relatives in the Italian side. Sorry for “left.
Although some call him “Twin Town”, Italian campaigner Andrea Belawite, the author of a guide on them, insisted both, saying “extremely different”.
“I like to think of them as two cities that combine and become a new reality that can help Europe and the world as a wonderful example of how the variety can help make something great, “He told AFP.
While 13,000 people live in Central Nova Gorika, where there is a high demand for housing, Gorizia has dropped its population up to 32,000 people.
It is about half 30 years ago, some Slovenians recently shocked properties in Italian city, where businesses are closing and real estate prices have fallen.
An attraction that Nova Gorika is expected to highlight, is that Charles X, the last French king of the Borban dynasty, is buried in a monastery.
After his proclamation in 1830, he found shelter in the Austrian Empire. He died in 1836 in a small town in Gorizia and was buried in a nearby Costjavika Math in modern Slovenia.
“This is the irony of the border who would have thought that the last French king Nova will rest in Gorika? Not in Gorizia, but in Nova Gorika, in that modernist socialist city! It tells a lot to those who think that we all organized Can do in boxes, “Madeweed smiled.
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