• 1 Hajdú Zoltán, Illés Iván, Raffay Zoltán, Southeast Europe: State Borders, Cross-Border Relations, S (...)

1Considering any of the contested delimitations of the Balkans such as the Danube and Sava rivers, the Carpathian and Balkan mountains, or the Trieste-Odessa line,1 the Italian border city of Trieste represents the gateway to the Balkan Peninsula. Being a multicultural city of Austrian heritage, Trieste has often been depicted as the place where the Latin and Slavic worlds converge, meaning the boundary between West and East and, during the Cold War, the boundary between capitalism and communism.

• 2 Ballinger Pamela, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders in the Balkans, Princeton, P (...)
• 3 Ibid., p. 18.
• 4 Tomaz Luigi, Il confine d’Italia in Istria e Dalmazia: Duemila anni di storia [The border of Italy (...)
• 5 Horel Catherine, Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire. 1880-1914: Imagined Communities and C (...)
• 6 Tomaz, Il confine, op. cit., p. 283.
• 7 Ara Angelo, Magris Claudio, Trieste, un’identità di frontiera [Trieste, a border identity], Turin, (...)

4Trieste is the biggest city in the historical region of the Julian March (Venezia Giulia), a broad region that extends from Gorizia in Italy and includes the whole peninsula of Istria, divided in the present day into Slovenia, Croatia, and the Italian village of Muggia.2 Trieste was a free port for centuries while Istria was part of the Republic of Venice, until 1797,3 the year that Napoleon signed the Treaty of Campo Formio and these lands passed to the Austrian Empire, ending with the Serenissima.4 Trieste and Istria were united for the first time in several centuries and, under Austrian rule, the city became the main harbour of the Empire. It was a multicultural place, a mix of a predominantly Italian-speaking population under Germanic rule and with a Slavic presence.5 Italy achieved unification in 1861 but could not include this region, which remained under the Austrian government. The outbreak of World War I was taken as an opportunity for Italy to declare war on Austria in 1915, and by the end of the conflict, these lands became Italian.6 The rise of fascism and Italian nationalism revived aversions towards non-Italian minorities and especially the Slavs. The Slovenian and Croatian languages were forbidden, their schools were closed, and their names and surnames were forcibly Italianised.7 The exclusive use of Italian toponyms such as Fiume, Abbazia, or Capodistria instead of Rijeka, Opatija, or Koper (Kopar in Croatian) was imposed.

• 8 Ballinger, History in exile, op. cit., p. 10.

5Important events took place, like the burning of the Narodni Dom (Slovene Cultural Centre) by the Blackshirts on 13 June 1920 and the subsequent pogrom of the Slavs. This conflict became increasingly tense during World War II when Yugoslav partisans took revenge on the Italian population of Istria with the foibe massacres, among others, where victims were thrown alive into the region’s karstic pits.8

• 9 Tomaz, Il confine, op. cit., p. 292.

6After a short Nazi occupation, Trieste and Istria were under Yugoslav partisan control, and, helped by the allies, the Free Territory of Trieste was created in 1947, separated into two zones: Zone A, under an Anglo-American government, including the whole city of Trieste up to Muggia; and Zone B, under the Yugoslav authorities, including the northwest part of Istria. The rest of this small peninsula passed to Federal Yugoslavia after the conflict. In 1954, the London Memorandum was signed: Zone A was given to Italy and Zone B to Yugoslavia. This memorandum became definitive in 1975 with the Treaty of Osimo.9

• 10 Locatelli Alessandra, “Fulvio Tomizza, écrivain de frontière,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée, vol. 86, (...)
• 11 Crkvenčić Ivan, “Emigration of Italians and Germans from Croatia during and immediately after the S (...)
• 12 “I was an Italian and a Slav, so neither Italian nor Slav, but ‘other’: A hybrid, born free and wea (...)
• 13 Deganutti Marianna et al., Rileggendo Tomizza [Rereading Tomizza], Roma, Aracne, 2014, p. 16.
• 14 Ballinger, History in Exile, op. cit., p. 24.
• 15 “We no longer speak one language, but two dialects which are interchangeable with each other and wh (...)

7These events made an important impression on the famous author Fulvio Tomizza (1935-1999), who was born in a small village of Istria called Juricani (Giurizzani in Italian) in today’s Croatia. In the thirties, the whole peninsula belonged to fascist Italy. The population of the coast, heir of Venetian dominance, was mostly Italian, while the inland was mostly Slav.10 In 1910, the Italian population in Istria was 45.3 per cent, decreasing to 18.8 per cent in 1948 and then to 8.1 per cent in 1961, years after the exodus.11 Tomizza was part of this hybrid community: “Ero italiano e slavo, in definitiva né italiano né slavo, ma ‘altro’: un ibrido, nato libero e benestante in un angolo di campagna rigoglioso ma umilissimo.”12 The mixed population was able to speak equally and alternatively not only Italian, Slovenian, and Croatian, but also Venetian dialects like Istro-Venetian and Slavic dialects like Čakavian,13 both heavily inflected with Italian and Slavic words and expressions and Germanic terms,14 a fact that shows their centuries-old presence in the territory: “Non si parla più una lingua, ma due dialetti intercambiabili tra loro e che per forza di cose tutti conoscono: in uno prevale il veneto, nell’altro lo sloveno-croato; ma esistono oggetti, animali, piante, atti, sensazioni, comandi, esortazioni, che impongono quel solo vocabolo e non un altro, sia esso italiano, croato, sloveno e perfino tedesco.”15

• 16 “My man from Materada eats Austrian-style on Sundays, Italian-style on the sidelines of the field, (...)

8Although we focus on the book Alle spalle di Trieste [Behind Trieste] in this article, it is worth mentioning that the characters in his novels are also mixed by name and represent the double identity of the region. They usually have an Italian name and a Slavic surname, sometimes Italianised but still clearly identifiable as Slav, such as Francesco Coslovich, the main character in his first work, Materada. At home, they speak “po našu” (in our way), the Slavic dialect, meaning that the character has arrived in his most intimate atmosphere. The culture of these characters is double or even triple: “il mio uomo di Materada la domenica mangia all’austriaca, sui bordi del campo all’italiana, nelle sere d’inverno alla slovena.”16

• 17 “[It was] no longer Austria and a Germanic culture, but Yugoslavia and the new communist verb arisi (...)

9In the author’s understanding, becoming Yugoslav and, as a consequence, communist, the framework of Istria is changed from a Central European environment of Germanic influence to a Balkan one: “Non più Austria e cultura germanica, ma Jugoslavia e il nuovo verbo comunista insorgente da un oscuro e riscoperto substrato di anima slava che prolungavano il mio confine almeno fino all’Ucraina.”17 The ethnic Italians remaining in Zone B (including Tomizza himself) were treated as traitors and fascist collaborators by the Yugoslav institutions, even though their presence in Istria was centuries old and many of them had fought with the partisans against the Nazi occupation. Speaking Italian or showing Italian identity was then considered a provocation. For that reason, this hybrid population, suspect for not entirely belonging to Slavic ethnicity, was forced to show its collaboration with the new regime:

• 18 Tomizza Fulvio, Materada, translated by Russell Scott Valentino, Evanston, Northwestern University (...)

10It was just like ‘48, when the Allied delegation had passed through to draw the Istrian borders and there was not a single Italian flag to be seen, not even with a red star. No, there were signs saying “We want Yugoslavia” and “We are all Croats” all over the place.18

• 19 Locatelli, “Fulvio Tomizza,” art. cit., p. 4.
• 20 Tomizza, Alle spalle, op. cit., p. 205.

11Many remained; many others fled to Italy in different waves, especially to Trieste, only fifty kilometres from home but a totally different political and social atmosphere. The city became in that moment of history a refugee centre. Shacks were built on the outskirts until the Council of Trieste could receive the thousands of displaced people. The esuli (exiled) were not always welcomed by the Triestines due to the allowances granted them by the authorities in such an economically difficult moment as the post-war period.19 Furthermore, this double identity was not always understood or accepted. Those who fled to Trieste were called by locals s’ciavi, or slaves, the etymological origin of Slavs. Those who remained in Yugoslavia, the rimasti, were called talianazi – that is, fascist.20

• 21 “Everything is double or triple in Trieste, starting with the flora and ending with ethnicity” (Aut (...)
• 22 “You know I am a Slav, a German, and an Italian” (Author’s translation). Ara, Magris, Trieste, op.  (...)

13According to the young poet Scipio Slataper, “ogni cosa è duplice o triplice a Trieste, cominciando con la flora e finendo con l’etnicità,”21 which shows the plurality of his identity: “Tu sai che io sono slavo, tedesco e italiano.”22 The Triestine identity has produced its own literature in the last two centuries with important authors like Italo Svevo, Giani Stuparich, the poet Umberto Saba, and, more recently, the famous writer Claudio Magris. Even foreigners like James Joyce showed interest in the city. Trieste, as seen by Triestines, has its own imaginary and its own perception of itself. Its particular geographic position, always on the periphery, on the edge of every country to which it belonged, is a crossroads of different influences: Venetian (Italian), Austrian (Germanic/Mitteleuropean), and Slavic (Eastern/Balkan).

• 23 “The guest already has the impression of having set foot in the country to which s/he is headed” (A (...)
• 24 Ara, Magris, Trieste, op. cit., p. 17.
• 25 Bosetti Gilbert, De Trieste à Dubrovnik. Une ligne de fracture de l’Europe, Grenoble, ELLUG, 2006, (...)
• 26 Ballinger, History in Exile, op. cit., p. 28.
• 27 Ibid., p. 13.
• 28 Ibid., p. 29.

14Its particular history, more related to the Habsburgs than to Rome itself, and being the gateway to the Balkans made Trieste totally estranged from Italy: “L’ospite in questa città ha l’impressione di aver già messo piede nel Paese a cui è diretto.”23 This fact, together with the fear of being Balkanised in the sense of being “invaded” by the neighbours, created a strong nationalism and a feeling of Italianness. According to Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris, this Triestine Italianness is the product of a continuous fight rather than a peaceful fact.24 Many travellers, among them Chateaubriand and Stendhal, considered the city the edge of Western civilization where the “barbarity” begins,25 while Russell considered it the geographic terminus of the modern European order.26 Trieste is the last city, where the trains make their last stop, and on account of its position, there is an unrequited love for the country to which it belongs.27 Its belonging to Italy completely changed not only its geographical position, but also its status: “Trieste went from being the cosmopolitan entrepôt of a Hapsburg imperial center at the end of the nineteenth century to the provincial, nationalist periphery of an Italian center at the end of the twentieth century.”28

• 29 “The more it feared being phagocytised by neighbouring Yugoslavia, the more it became the commercia (...)
• 30 Ibid., p. 133.

15During the Cold War, Trieste became a very important commercial place for its proximity to the communist bloc, especially Yugoslavia, as Tomizza said at a conference in June 1991: “Più temeva di venir fagocitata dalla confinante Jugoslavia e più diventava capoluogo commerciale e oasi di pacifico ritrovo di sloveni, croati, serbi, bosniaci, macedoni e montenegrini, notoriamente in cattivo riporto dentro il loro territorio.”29 Tomizza, as he identified himself, was a border writer.30 His peripheral region had more in common with Trieste, the city where he lived for more than forty years, than with Rome, Ljubljana, or Zagreb, and he was a firm defender of the regionalism of a borderless Istria.

• 31 Petrović Tanja, “Ponterosso i moralna ekonomija sećanja na jugoslovenski socijalizam” [Ponterosso a (...)

17Unlike citizens of other communist countries, Yugoslavs had the privilege of holding a passport that let them travel abroad. Consequently, many of them, especially Croats and Slovenes (for proximity reasons), were able to cross the border to Trieste for shopping.31 For this section, we take into consideration Drakulić’s essay Café Europa: Life after Communism, published in 1996:

• 33 petrović, “Ponterosso,” art. cit., p. 387.

18Trieste is the nearest Italian city coming from the Balkans. According to the imagology that this city evoked, not only in Yugoslavia but in the whole communist bloc, it represented, as the author says in Alessio Bozzer’s 2017 documentary Trieste, Yugoslavia, “the showcase of capitalism,” where Yugoslavs acquired a European sense of taste, beauty, and elegance33 through the label “Made in Italy.” Being the biggest supermarket in the Balkans, Triestines looked down on Yugoslavs for “polluting” their city every weekend, even though the local economy was absolutely dependent on this shopping tourism.

• 35 Petrović, “Ponterosso,” art. cit., p. 392.
• 36 Ibid., p. 394.

19The shoppers normally did not spend money on leisure or on tourism.35 There was also an economy of smuggling and resale of goods from Trieste, especially jeans and coffee, on which Yugoslavs made money.36

• 39 Ibid., p. 114.

22It was common to get a fake bill of sale in Trieste, as the sellers there were used to clients coming from former Yugoslav countries: “The usual way to go about this is to get a fake bill from the shop where you buy your goods. This is not a problem in Italy, especially in Trieste or in any of the shops close to the Italian border.”39

• 46 Ibid., p. 49.
• 47 Ibid., p. 10.

29Given its peripheral position, this triple boundary was mistakenly considered by citizens of the socialist countries as a border that was easier to cross than the Berlin Wall itself, a “green border.”46 In consequence, many people from communist countries, especially East Germans (locally called “the sandals”47), took advantage of their holidays on the Black Sea or Red Riviera and tried to cross to capitalist Turkey, normally via the Rezovo River. Some of them were successful, but many others were not.

• 49 Ibid., p. 123.

32Even though the three states share the same region, the same mountains and the same regional culture, there are “three alphabets, three currencies, three versions of history.”49

• 50 Ibid., p. 175.

33This crossroads has always been a corridor: to Turkey from the communist bloc during the Cold War and, in 2014, for refugees coming from Syria and other countries in the Middle East to Europe, the “Balkan route”: “The corridors used in the Cold War remain the same. Only the direction of travel has changed.”50

• 52 Ibid., p. 128.
• 53 Ibid., p. 176.
• 54 Wilson Thomas M., Donnan Hastings, A Companion to Border Studies, Oxford, Wiley Blackwell, 2012, p. (...)

36As Kassabova explains, Bulgaria and Greece, being the external limits of the European Union, represent in the imagology the limits between Europe and Asia. The Maritsa River (Evros in Greek and Meriç in Turkish) is the natural border between Greece and Turkey and represents a kind of Bosphorus in the region. The same applies to the Rezovo river between Turkey and Bulgaria. Bulgarians and Greeks crossing to Turkey have the feeling of no longer being in Europe: “What do you notice about the non-European side of the border?”52, “In a Turkish café not far from the European border [...].”53 We can say that since the fall of communism and the entrance of Balkan states into the EU, not only has Turkey been put in the corner of Europe, but it has also lost its position as a Western country54 and consequently its Europeanness. The Bulgarian-Turkish checkpoint is where the West (Bulgaria) meets the East (Turkey), while it was completely the other way round during the Cold War.

• 55 Kassabova, Border, op. cit., p. 123.
• 56 Ibid., p. 128.

37“At the checkpoint between Europe and Asia, the fallen leviathan of a communist-era factory was twinned by a shiny giant mosque,”55 writes Kassabova, and then describes the first impression of Turkey this way: “a red flag with a crescent flapped above, and two massive buildings loomed: a mosque and a shopping mall. The road was bigger and better.”56

• 57 Ibid., p. 130.

38Edirne is one of the biggest cities in the region. It can be seen from the Greek border city of Kastanies, “spread out like a concubine in the haze.”57 As in any other border city, the Turkish identity is strong:

• 60 Wilson, Donnan, A Companion, op. cit., p. 569-570.

40As with any other cities along the border, they “occupy an important position in regional commerce, migration and discourses of public order.”60 Both cities are spaces of leisure for foreigners coming from the other side:

• 63 Ibid., p. 168-169.
• 64 Ibid., p. 155.

41However, the Ottomans arrived and established their first capital there, outside Anatolia, in Rumelia (land of Romans) – that is, the Ottoman Balkans or Turkey in Europe for almost one century, from 1362 until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The citizens are proud of belonging to Europe: “Can you feel the European vibe? I could. The leafy streets were in a tidy grid, no ‘oriental lanes’, and the houses were huge, with balconies.”63 The Orthodox priest of the city, of Bulgarian origin, points out: “We are not Europe and we are not Asia. We are Thrace. Notice: those who live in the European part of Turkey don’t tend to cross the Bosphorus. They like to stay on the Balkan peninsula, close to Europe. This is Thrace.”64

• 65 Glenny Misha, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-2011, London, Penguin Books (...)

42A monument to the Treaty of Lausanne, the treaty that set the borders of the republic of Turkey,65

• 67 Ibid., p. 139.
• 68 Ibid., p. 143.
• 69 Ibid., p. 146.

44In Bulgaria, there were two Islamic groups, heirs of the Ottoman presence: the ethnic Turks and the Pomaks. The first group were Turks who had settled in Bulgaria for centuries. In the eighties, a name-changing campaign, called “Revival Process” by the authorities, was begun in order to de-Islamise them. Those who did not accept it were “invited” to go to Turkey on what was unofficially called the “Big Vacation.” However, they were not always welcomed in the host country: “[I]n Bulgaria they call me a Turk, and in Turkey they call me a Bulgarian. What am I, tell me!67 [...] Go to Turkey, they said, you’re Turks, but what was Turkey? Nobody knew.”68 Kassabova devotes an entire chapter to the story of one girl who, like many others, did not speak any Turkish. She and her family found out that they were of Turkish origin only when the Bulgarian police came to tell them that they had to leave the country. One day, the Turkish police came to her tent in the refugee camp, shook her, and said, “What kind of a Turk are you if you don’t speak Turkish?”69 She never spoke Bulgarian again, and until she learnt the language of her new country, she fell between languages. Others at least spoke an archaic Ottoman form of Turkish and only had to update it.

• 70 Ibid., p. 256.

45Alongside this group of ethnic Turks, there is another group of Muslims in the region of the Rhodope Mountains, on the Bulgarian-Greek border among other localities: the so-called Pomaks. This is a small group of one hundred thousand members who speak a Bulgarian dialect and practise Islam. Being Slav and Muslim, they were suspect in the eyes of the Bulgarian and Greek governments. In Bulgaria they were suspect because, even if they were considered natives, they represented a continuation of the Ottoman past from the perspective of the ethno-nationalist ideology adopted by the communist regime, as well as by the governments in power since the establishment of Bulgaria as a state in 1878. For this reason, they were forced to Slavicise their names. In Greece, where the mosques in the northeast show their presence, they were doubly rejected on account of their religion and their language, and their names were Turkicised in order not to sound too Bulgarian.70 Those who refused to be renamed had to swap one mountain for another on the Turkish side, leaving everything behind.

• 72 Ibid., p. 322.

47An important consequence of these policies of population exchange is the presence of empty villages, found everywhere along the three borders. Kassabova tells the story of an old man who refused to leave his village at the beginning of the Cold War and received the task of turning on the lights in the empty houses to show Turkey that socialist Bulgaria was enjoying abundant electricity. At the same time, from the Turkish border, the soldiers periodically fired their machine guns in the direction of Bulgaria to show the enemy their might, even though, as Kassabova remarks, “they had no shoes.”72

• 73 Javourez Guillaume, “Introduction. Au-delà de la ‘route des Balkans’ : mondes sociaux des circulati (...)
• 74 Kassabova, Border, op. cit., p. 175.
• 75 Ibid., p. 180.

49At the time of Kassabova’s travel, this triple border was the beginning of the Balkan route – that is, where migrants from the Middle East, especially Syrians, Afghans and Kurds, cross into the EU to follow a long journey to Central and Northern European countries. This route was closed in 2016 for the EU-Turkey deal, but it is still a hotspot.73 As stated previously, the corridors have always been the same; only the direction has changed.74 Germans are no longer trying to cross the border into Turkey; instead, thirty years later, migrants are crossing from Turkey to reach Germany. Traffickers from all sides of the border take advantage of this situation for black market trading. They are mostly locals who know the wild nature of the region well and the points where the political borders leak. The Rhodope mountains, Strandja, and the Rezovo and Maritsa rivers are the principal crossing points to evade the controls. On numerous occasions, the refugees are told that they have already reached the EU although they are still in Turkey. On other occasions, those who reach Bulgaria and Greece are welcomed by locals, as they or their ancestors are familiar with forced migration and empathise with their cause. They are detained in refugee camps, many waiting for asylum and others waiting to follow their route. The wire of the border is present in their everyday lives, as they are not allowed to move. A family atmosphere is created among the refugees. They frequent the same places, like cafés or restaurants managed by other migrants. These places have become for them a kind of Casablanca,75 but one much less romantic.

• 76 Leersen Joep, “Imagology: History and Method,” Studia Imagologica, vol. 13 (Imagology: The Cultural (...)

50The symbology of the cities of Trieste and Edirne and the collective imagology have changed in local literature from the Cold War to the present day. These cities, even distant and historically unrelated, have a shared fate as corridors and geographical and mental boundaries. Imagology is not the critical history of national characterisation but the cultural convention and construction of the other and the self and, for this reason, it is subjective and based on preconceptions and stereotypes.76 Leaving behind for a moment the geographical theories of the Sava and Danube or the Trieste-Odessa line and considering only the collective imaginary of the region based on the three authors, we could ask the following question: what in the imagology of the studied literary oeuvres is considered a Balkan place and why?

• 77 Drakulić Slavenka, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, New York, Harper Perennial, 1993, p. (...)

51We can consider that one important characteristic is a communist past. In the introduction to her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić writes, “the reality is that communism persists in the way people behave, in the look on their faces, in the way they think [...] The end of communism is still remote because communism, more than a political ideology or a method of government, is a state of mind.”77 During the Cold War, Europe was divided into West/capitalism–East/communism. After the fall of this dichotomy, new divisions were needed:

• 79 Tomizza, Alle spalle, op. cit., p. 46.
• 80 Todorova Maria, Imagining the Balkans, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 136.

52A communist past is a link that relates the peninsula to Central and Eastern Europe. As seen above, Tomizza’s Istria changed its geographical position from Central European to the periphery of the Balkans when it passed to communist Yugoslavia. Also, the crowds of Yugoslavs that every weekend “invaded” the streets of Trieste looking for a capitalist taste were seen by locals, as the author stated, as a Balkanization of the city,79 even though he considered that Trieste has a lot more in common with its neighbours than with Rome itself. According to Slavenka Drakulić, it was precisely the fall of the communist regime and the subsequent wars in Yugoslavia that lowered the region to be called “the Balkans” in a pejorative way. The wars, in many cases, especially in the United States, were covered as the “Balkan wars” instead of the Yugoslav wars.80

• 82 Dimova Marija Gjorgjieva, “Imagological Topoi in Balkan Literatures,” Journal of Literature and Art (...)
• 83 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, op. cit., p. 162.

53The Balkans, on the other hand, also represent an evocation of the East – in other words, the orientalism of Eastern Europe.82 That the Balkans are the legacy to the Ottoman Empire is Todorova’s conclusion in her essay Imagining the Balkans.83 However, this identity is not rigid, but flexible and fluid. That is why we find in both Trieste and Edirne characteristics of Balkanness and non-Balkanness. Trieste, the most eastern Italian city, does not have an Ottoman past. In fact, it is historically Catholic and related to the Austro-Hungarian legacy; nevertheless, the vicinity of the former Yugoslavia and its Slavic language and communist past are what have made it the gateway to the Balkans. Recalling the confrontation between West/capitalism–East/communism, it is precisely in Trieste that we find the entrance hall to the region.

• 84 Ibid., p. 3.

54In the case of Edirne, there is no more Ottoman legacy than in its heir, Turkey. In addition, this country has geographic territory in the Balkans, but we can see that it is exactly there where these features start to blur for this non-communist past and a non-Slav/non-Orthodox majority. A Western traveller may say that the Balkans are the “‘other’ of Europe”84 or the edge of the old continent, and it is precisely this quality of belonging to the Balkans that makes Turkish Thrace European; in other words, Balkan features in Turkish culture (mainly of the Ottoman past) are what allow this country to claim Europeanness, while these same features in Balkan countries could be considered a characteristic of non-Europeanness for being Turkish. The traveller may have the feeling of having already reached Asia once the Turkish border is crossed just because the EU external borders have been left behind and Europe has become a metonym for the European Union. For this reason, we could consider that in the imagology, the limit of the Balkans in the southeast part of the peninsula is the border city of Edirne. It is there where we might find that this part of Thrace also has a lot in common with the other sides of the border and the rest of the region for the Ottoman legacy, as Kapka Kassabova experienced in the garden of a Turkish family:

• 86 Ibid., p. 30.

57“On the national border, national order”86 was the slogan set on the Bulgarian side during communism. Crossing the border was a crime that in many cases meant death. Nowadays, even if the borders are open and Bulgaria has become a member of the Schengen Area in 2024, the everyday life of migrants coming from the Middle East is very similar to those times. As an important point on the Balkan route, Edirne, once considered a Western city, is the gateway to the EU external border. The same is true of Trieste, the end of the route, the first Italian city, a place that, like Edirne, has lost its position as a Western oasis. Kassabova’s interest in the border does not leave behind the destiny of the migrants stuck there. Having moved to New Zealand and then to Scotland, she empathises with these people and includes them as part of this border that has always been a historical corridor from/to the West.