Miha Kosovel: The cross-border city identity makes everyone involved a person with larger horizons and richer experience

The Bridge of Friendship, 21 June 2025

On 6 June 2025, the Slovenian intellectual Miha Kosovel gave a lecture at the Ambar Hotel in Giurgiu on the cross-border city of Nova Gorica (Slovenia) – Gorizia (Italy), its status as the European Capital of Culture in 2025, and the insights that can be gained from the cross-border experience. The lecture was part of the Play Giurgiu festival, which will take place in Giurgiu and Ruse at the end of June 2025, showing films for young audiences.

Mihai Mitrică from Animest, the organiser of the Play Giurgiu festival, introduced the guest, after which Miha Kosovel gave his presentation. The experience of Nova Gorica and Gorizia is important for Ruse and Giurgiu, as they are twin cities divided by an EU border. During the discussion following his lecture, Miha Kosovel spoke about the cultural practices of the two towns of Nova Gorica-Gorizia as European Capitals of Culture and the transformational effects of having a cross-border identity.

Mihai Mitrică: I’m from Giurgiu and work in the cultural sector. I’m currently based in Bucharest, but as I’m from here, I wanted to do something for this city. Two years ago, we started this project with the caravan and came here for the first time. There was a very good response from the people of Giurgiu, so we continued.

We continued to develop this special festival tailored for the city. Last year was the first edition, and we also held screenings in Block 14 in Ruse. This year, however, we received funding from the county council, our film fund and other sources.

The second edition will be bigger this year. We will also have two days of screenings in Ruse, which I am very happy about. I just wanted to let you know that this is the second edition.

It will take place at the end of June, after schools break up for the summer. Now, as it’s still very new, I’m going to show you the trailer for this year’s festival. The main target audience will be young people. There will be special events and workshops for children, as well as evening events for all kinds of audiences, such as parents and children.

I will now show you the trailer and then introduce our special guest, who has come all the way from Slovenia for this presentation. As I said at the beginning, this event would not be possible without the help of our partners. So thank you all, especially for this presentation, which is very important for cities like Giurgiu and Nova Gorica, because our guest is coming from Nova Gorica, the border city in Slovenia, and Gorizia, an Italian city just one metre across the border.

This year, both of these transborder cities are European cultural capitals, which gives us hope that one day it could happen in Ruse-Giurgiu too. Now, please give a warm welcome to Miha Kosovel. Good morning, and thank you for coming.

Thank you, Mihai. Good morning! I only have a minute to connect. Thank you very much for hosting me and for inviting me to organise this stay here, Ligia and Helga.

I’m normally very glad to be here. The last time I was here was in 2022 as part of a project in a trans-border laboratory, which I will explain later. I also met my friend Vladimir Mitev there, who came from Ruse, and I’m very glad he was able to join us.

As Mihai said, I was invited because Nova Gorica and Gorizia have been named the European Capital of Culture this year. This title is awarded to two different towns every year. This year, Nova Gorica received the title in partnership with Gorizia, and Chemnitz in Germany is also a European Capital of Culture.

Neither of them are the biggest or most developed cities, and I think this is what I want to show with this presentation: what the idea of cultural capital actually means, and the practices that are involved this year. I want to show how smaller cities with a less well-known history can develop their identity through cultural activities, and how this can contribute to tourism and industry as well.

Our focus here would be on contextualizing culture in the development of the city. Just a few words about me: My name is Miha and I am a cultural producer, editor, publicist, and writer. I collaborated with my municipality and the Ministry of Culture on matters related to NGOs and their strategic involvement.

I come from an NGO (non-governmental organisation), like the organisation hosting me here. We have three main projects: a quarterly magazine called Raspotja (Crossroad), which focuses on culture and humanities; a literary festival called Mesto knjige (City of Books); and a cultural hub in the former border checkpoint between the towns of Gorizia and Nova Gorica, called Carinarnica. I’m also active in the European Capital of Culture because of my involvement with my organisation. I was part of the initial expert group that developed the concept and strategy for the Capital of Culture, and I now manage a program in the literary and publishing field as an outside collaborator.

I will start here with a quote from Kapka Kassabova, a well-known Bulgarian writer who was our guest last week. She talks about borders. I couldn’t find it in the original English, so I translated it from Slovenian, so it might not sound as good, but hopefully you can still understand the message:

 ‘A strictly controlled border is always violent.’ Kapka Kassabova says, ‘A strictly controlled border is always violent. Here, authority suddenly acquires a body, if not a human face, as an ideology. One of the most obvious ideologies concerning borders is nationalism. Borders exist to separate one nation-state from another. However, a more insidious ideology in practice is centralism: the belief that the centre of power can issue orders and sacrifice the periphery with impunity from a distance. The fact that the periphery lies beyond the centre’s field of vision is erased from memory. Border areas are always peripheral and beyond the centre’s field of vision.”

Kapka Kassabova puts here the central point that unites Nova Gorica and Gorizia and Giurigu and Ruse, and which was also our starting point. She says that the state is structured in this way, with a centre and a periphery. The centre issues orders, and the edges are usually sacrificed.

This is what we see in reality every day. We are battling peripheralisation, which means we are tackling demographic problems. There are fewer young people around nowadays, and they get sucked out of the periphery to what constitutes a centre.

We are facing economic problems because we are not essential, but rather part the edge of an imagined territory. These are the fundamental problems we started with. We discovered that we are two cities on the periphery — Nova Gorica and Gorizia — and nobody seems to care about us anymore. Nobody is interested in us. So, how can we reshape or redirect this process? From the outset, we must provide some context.

I will also be brief with my words because I don’t want to take up too much time. So, just some context. Here is the geographical context:

Gorica/Gorizia was a city established around the year 1000. So it’s more than a thousand years old. The toponym Gorica is Slavic and derives from a diminutive of “gora” – mountain.

From the early time we know that beside the Slavic speaking population that it was inhabited also by Roman-speaking people, such as Italians and Friulians, as well as German-speaking people and Jews. It existed for thousands of years as a crossroads between the Pyrenees Peninsula and the Balkan Peninsula, and between the Mediterranean Sea and Central Europe and the Alpine region. So, it was always a very diverse place, and this continued for many years.

From around the year 1500, it was part of the Austrian Empire. In the 19th century, it began to develop because of its location. Its southern part, its Mediterranean part, connected the port of Austria, Trieste, with its capital, Vienna. It’s a place with very good weather and ideal conditions for agriculture, so it was also called the Garden of Vienna. In the 19th century, it developed in a very specific way because the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially the Austrian part, was not unitarized or monolingual, so it developed in a very multiethnic and multilingual way. This happened especially because of the compulsory schooling reform. However, the compulsory schools introduced by Maria Theresa were not in German, but in the vernacular languages. These languages began to develop from the 18th century onwards, and became the basis of the national awakening in 19th century. It’s not a coincidence that on the ruins of the Austrian Empire there are so many nation-states nowadays. 

This also led to a strong sense of national identity, and by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there were Slovenian, Italian, and German-speaking schools in Gorica, as well as Slovenian, Italian, German, and Friulian libraries and magazines. It was a vibrant place, a small town with a strong cultural identity that also developed essential institutions. At some point, they achieved a significant technical feat: the construction of the Transalpina railway through the Alps. We will see a picture of it later. They thought that this city would grow to become a rather big city, but this didn’t happen because war broke out.

The war began when Italy entered the First World War alongside Austria, resulting in the the outskirts of Gorica and the river Soča to become the front between them. After the First World War, this part of the region with a quarter of nowadays Slovenia became part of the Italian Kingdom which quickly became a fascist state. Here is Mussolini in Gorizia in 1938. [picture] The fascist regime was completely different; it didn’t allow people to speak their own language. In schools and shops, you could only speak Italian. All Slovenian schools and churches were banned. There were signs in public spaces where it was written “Qui si parla soltanto Italiano – you are allowed to speak just in Italian”. This also led to uprisings of the Slovenian community, with the first anti-fascist organisations being established in the late 1920s. They were called TIGR, which stands for Trieste, Istria, Gorica, Rijeka. The 20 years of fascism were horrible for the population, but the Second World War was even more with the occupation by the Germans. So there were a lot of wars, which ended in 1945, as we know, but in 1947, they started to decide. This territory had been one territory for thousands of years and was multicultural and multi-ethnic, but at some point, it had to be divided between Italy and Yugoslavia. In 1947, the so-called White Line divided the territory in half, leaving the city of Gorizia on the Italian part and the railway infrastructure in the Yugoslavian part.

This big building, which had once held out hopes for a bright future, was now located directly on the border. What happened next? There were really big tensions with the Yugoslavian army because they saw themselves as the winners of the war and thought the city of Gorizia, as well as Trieste, should be part of Yugoslavia. However, the American army didn’t want to give them up because, even though the Yugoslavian army was their ally, it was part of the communist part.

There were big quarrels and a lot of aggression in the air. Still, at some point in 1947, they came up with the idea of creating a new Gorica. They decided to build a new city with the same name as the old one, so they called it Nova Gorica.

So Nova Gorica was established in 1947 to turn the idea of defeat into the idea of victory. They created a town on a grid, with parallel streets, but one diagonal, which was connected to the old Gorizia, with the idea that, one day maybe they will become connected. 

There was a big celebration when the saga came to work on what we now see in the documents. They were working, but they didn’t really achieve much because it was more like an exchange programme. They came there to have fun for a few years — they played, etc. With all this going on, the city started to evolve, but very early on, too, because, with Tito’s quarrel in ’48, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia lost interest in Nova Gorica, so it was only developed at a regional level. The city was never built as originally planned. It was planned in very big scale, but it developed more organically, which is interesting because it developed completely differently.

Now, we have two nearby cities which have lived with an unmarked border for 20 years because the peace agreement was still being negotiated. There were two cities side by side until the 1970s, when the Osimo Agreement declared the provisional border to be the real border between Yugoslavia and Italy. Small checkpoints were opened to allow inhabitants to cross. Even though it was part of a war front, the border between Italy and Slovenia or Yugoslavia, especially in this region, was one of the most open borders in the world. For us locals, there was a propustica, which was like a passport for locals, and it was easy to pass. You couldn’t take it out of the country, though. It was more because many Italians were part of minorities. We’ll soon talk about this building as well, and how this border near the railway station became part of some kind of idea to play with. Here we can see people playing. Volleyball for the fans. 

So a big step was in 2004 when Slovenia joined the European Union. The biggest event of all the European Union took place in the square in front of the railway station. After this came the Schengen Agreement in 2007. I would like to share this quote: ‘No borders were made out of love. The border is the physical border of the world, but in a way, the border is maybe the first step to peace. The next step is how to cross the border.’ The cities lived in a very parallel way for a long time. They existed very near each other, and there were a lot of maybe non-interest. There were formal connections between the two cities, but as two cities they were planned and existed side by side. There were no meetings between the mayors or urban planners, so when you came to the municipality 15 years ago, there was a map with nothing on it. It was black on both sides, so it was just a black map. 

The cities were turned away from each other, so there was no interaction between them. Both cities had a strong national identity and the idea that they were guardians of their national space. There was a process whereby if you were nationalist enough, you could make a political career out of it. Even though Slovenia was very left-wing and communist, the other side had right-wing governments. It had fascist parties, this was how things were, and we took it for granted. People like me, when I was young, would go to the border to buy things, and then people from Italy would come and buy goods, mostly meat, and then go back. In the ’80s, the casinos started, and the Italians would come to buy fuel and cigarettes, and then go back. This was kind of normal, and it was also expected of all institutions to behave like this. 

After 2007, especially at night, on the night of 21 December 2007, a project was launched that I think was very defining for the cities. It was called the Confessionary of Smugglers. One of our great artists and film directors created a project that was installed at the border checkpoint I showed you before, between the two cities. This is the road that connects the two city centres, and there is one border checkpoint here and one there. She created a project called the Confessionary of Smugglers, which was installed at the border on the last day before it was closed. Under the Schengen Agreement, the police and the Ministry gave her the idea that people would confess what they had been doing in recent years. People came to confess what they had been smuggling. It’s a beautiful film. I can show you the link. 

People came and said, ‘You know, I was smuggling schnapps to Italy, but my bottle was full of milk. I showed it to the guard, but it was schnapps.’ People talked about what they had been doing. In Italy, there wasn’t political censorship, but there was strong moral censorship. 

Films by Pasolini, for example, couldn’t be seen in Italy or smaller cities, so people went to Yugoslavia to watch them because there was a lot of nudity and sex. This was OK because Yugoslavia had different censorship laws, so a lot was going on. People came together to talk about their feelings about the border, and what they were smuggling from each other. 

This idea of smuggling became one of the central themes. Because, at some point, it connected the memories of people who lived side by side in parallel. So, if we don’t have a national connective memory, we have these memories that are border memories, which are so particular yet universal, because everyone can relate to them. A lot of people in Europe can understand these stories, so these professional partners became a project that took place every year with different professionals. In the end, it became something like a hospital of memories. People came to share their memories of a particular place or event, and the documentaries tried to bring all these memories together to create a multi-perspective view of the area. So, how can we perceive a divided territory as a mosaic of experiences, tragedies and sadness, but also comical events? After these two major projects, a museum called ‘Sparling’ was established in an ex-border nearby, and the other is Ternavitz, where the hub is located. I came from there and managed to record this experience.

So, Ternavitz, the house that was the checkpoint, was part of the project and the petition that I mentioned. After the project, the petition from the different cultural organisations came about, and they wanted to take this place as a legacy. But what kind of legacy? I think it’s interesting that we have different types of heritage. We have heritage in the form of old bridges, beautiful churches and city centres, but we also have contested heritage, which we call problematic heritage. This is heritage that is part of our lives but does not signal something positive. In the Italian context We have many questions about what to do with fascist Mussolini architecture, statues, and so on. Here, we also came to the question of what heritage actually is. Is it something that we should just clear away, or could we use it to think about it? 

One of the decisions made by my organisation, some others, and the municipalities is that we used all the former border checkpoints. The first one was to talk about borders, but also to rethink what borders and liminal spaces are, and to talk about memories of borders, but also to create new memories and narratives. So I came here to search for a new territory. Our idea was to start holding cultural events in this space to find a new place. People from Gorizia have their own spaces there, but they always visit someone when they come here. They cross the border and go to someone’s home, but what if we think of the border as a completely new territory? It could be a new centre for both of us, and we wouldn’t need to be part of one city.

We just invented it. So we started doing these ideas of common territory, border territories, because they are ancient, degraded territories. But if we relive them, they can become a central part of the new, double town of Gorica.

Some events were really strange and fun. One person put flowers here and let cars go up and down. It was raining, so he made a dome and then made bread out of it, like common bread. These were some of the different events, such as music events, and we also had a few festivals directed there. For example, this fashion designer created a whole fashion project based on memories of how grandmothers looked on the other side. Retrospectively, it looks very logical, but at the time, we really felt that we didn’t have anything to show. That’s the story. 

I could also talk about some technicalities, but maybe we could talk about the process of applying for capital culture funding if you’re interested. It’s very easy to understand: you have a list of questions and you talk about them. One of the first questions is ‘Why do you want to be a European capital?’ and in these first questions you must actually explain exactly why you want to be a European capital and why you think you should be one. You have to explain why you think you should have this title. This is an important point because the European Capital of Culture doesn’t ask what you have to show to be a capital city, but asks what you want and what you think you should do to be a capital city. This process is what I talked about before: how we shifted the idea of what a capital city is to the European level. The thing that the Capital of Culture asks of you is not how to be pretty and cool, but how you confront your weaknesses. 

You need to be very direct about your weaknesses as a city. This is very important. There’s a story about the Rijeka when it was the European Capital of Culture in 2020. When the mayor read the big book — it’s called the big book because you prepare for it — he said, ‘Is my town really so bad?’ He was almost in tears.

But why? It’s important because if you want to transform your town, you must face your weaknesses and recognise your shortcomings. I think this is a painful process.

But why? Because culture in the European Capital of Culture is not just for show. It’s not something you can just put on your city to make it prettier or more vibrant.

It must be considered a transformative force. Culture must engage people in some way, providing a reason for them to get involved. Culture here is not just about organising playful events.

It must be playful and have events. However, it could also be painful in its attempt to reshape how institutions and urbanism work, and how we try to become a different town or city. I have written some of my texts here.

From the outset, I viewed this as a core mission of the ‘Gorizia’ European Capital of Culture project. The aim is to address real issues through cultural engagement, develop and showcase cross-border urban practices that could inspire similar cities, and offer hope to regions facing closed, heavily guarded borders. Culture and art are not just decorative escapes from reality.

They are tools for reflection and transformation. Without this transformative element, there is actually no cultural capital. This is also why we were talking to Mihai on the way here.

Nowadays, the capital of culture is awarded to smaller cities because they want to see real development through the capital of culture, which is impossible in bigger cities because they are already so developed that it would not make a noticeable difference. But smaller cities, or cities with major issues, such as Chemnitz, which has significant problems with far-right hooliganism and post-industrial decline, can benefit from cultural capital. They want cultural capital to have a very noticeable impact on everyday life.

The European dimension is the most important aspect of the European Capital of Culture. This means that what we are doing and how we present our project idea must have some kind of impact on Europe. It’s not just a local problem; it’s presented as a European problem.

Why? Because the European Capital of Culture presents Europe to the rest of the world and to Europe itself. Therefore, every European capital of culture has a story about Europe.

For example, Nova Gorica and Gorizia told the story of borders. But we always have European capitals of culture that talk about other ways of life. There was also the Youth Capital of Culture, and maybe now is the time for it.

So, what is the European dimension of everything we do? That’s everything I wanted to share with you. The city needs artists, philosophers, writers and other thinkers not just to analyse data, but also to transform it into an ambitious and revolutionary vision that is almost tangible.

So, I will finish my presentation here. The most important thing about this is not only the preparation, but the legacy. The legacy of the European Capital of Culture in Novogratz is the complete renovation of the waterfront.

You saw the area around the train station and all the parts that had deteriorated because of the border. Here are some more pictures. But the legacy is also the unexpected externalities, which are very important.

We have a programme and a vision for what the European Capital of Culture will bring, but there are also many things that are happening because of it. I think it’s interesting to see what’s happening in parallel with the project. Here, I want to use some words of my friend Vladimir Mitev, who talks about the ‘bridge of friendship’ metaphor. A bridge is consciously made, but it also produces dynamism that is part of the life that exists because of it.

I think the most important thing is these unplanned externalities. The first thing is institutional rethinking, because institutions are normally in the service of a town. But in this new reality, every institution must rethink itself and its role in the wider cross-border context. So, every institution — from schools to cultural institutions and political bodies — is now thinking about how it exists in this completely new cross-border reality.

This is not something that has already been done, decided or defined; it’s a strong ongoing process. I would like to conclude by mentioning the Trans-Bordering Laboratory project, which we started years ago to connect civil society in different border towns. This is usually our project, but I would like to mention that, alongside these projects, there are many others, including from institutions and politics. In fact, I was turned down by all the subcommittees and parts of the delegation from different border towns, which were organised at an administrative level.

The European Capital of Culture has actually brought about much greater organisation between border towns across Europe, but it has also encouraged these cities to learn from each other and share best practice in dealing with border issues. I will finish with a quote: “Twin border cities are Europe’s living laboratories, turning margins into borders and borders into bridges. Here on the edges, Europe is being reinvented.” 

Thank you very much. If you would like to, you can ask me a question or we can just have a coffee.

Assen Nikolov: Hi, it’s good to see you here. Thank you for the great presentations. The story about the two cities is really interesting, so I enjoyed it. Thank you. 

Could you tell us two things that were included in the plan for becoming the cultural capital of Europe? For example, could you tell us two things that you planned to do in both cities? How was this managed? Were there any main ideas or anything else?

Miha Kosovel: A lot was planned around the border belt because of the ideas that the border cities had. Let’s say that on the border, we meet two different national narratives around certain issues. These commercial partners explored these issues in films about how different people have different memories of the same events in the same places based on their ethnicity. This kind of thing has developed a lot through memory studies, which are very important in our region on both sides. 

Now, a museum about the interpretation of the 20th century will open on the border belt in a few weeks. It’s not a museum about the 20th century, but about how different countries or communities remember and interpret it. It’s a museum of subjectivity, if you will. This is one of the bigger programmes. 

From the beginning, the idea was that the capital of culture is not just about building things.

Years ago, people invested a lot of money from the capital of culture in building projects, but then they didn’t provide funding for artists. So there’s a big emphasis on building soft infrastructure, which means making projects and enabling cultural actors to do their work. But that is everything we do, and we try to do it in collaboration with others.

So, I think the biggest challenge is how all the organisations will collaborate at some point. This is the main thing, I think. Then again, you know, because this is the capital of culture, it needs arts events and productions.

There are really big things, like a theatre director staging 12 plays on various issues ranging from the 1970s to the present day. It’s like a whole story of the region through this place. One venue is very small, just for one visitor, while another is now in a stadium. So, you have these big art events that are normally very interesting for anyone interested in art or culture, as well as exhibitions and so on. But for me, it’s somehow enhancing the basic vision of the European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica, and making these two cities into one through culture.

A Giurgiu student: What is the population of the twin cities of Nova Gorica and Gorizia?

Yes, the population of the two cities combined is around 70,000. Yes, they are small. They have always had poor demographics because of the border.

Vladimir Mitev: You spoke about cultural transformation and how cross-border cities are being created. Could you explain what this specifically means in the case of Gorizia and Nova Gorica?

Are there any articles, research or surveys that explore what cross-border identity means? What has changed and what is new about this identity?

Miha Kosovel: This is what I wanted to show with this identity shift, because I think a big transformation in identity is feeling at home at the border. You know, understanding that the reality of history is not a simple tale, but that there are many points of view and personal tragedies, and that you can identify more with these than with the big heroic story of the nation. I think the idea that you should always try to understand history as a mosaic rather than a beautiful picture is very relevant right now.

I think it’s become a huge source of pride to be a person from the border, someone who can actually live in both worlds. I think the biggest transformation of all was the valorisation of this. Because when you do that, museums and other national institutions, such as theatres, must also recognise this.

Before, you didn’t need to valorise. You know, before, a museum on one side was doing its own thing. Another museum was doing their own thing.

But now, when they are doing their thing, they must also understand how it is visible from the other side. Or how can we engage the other side in reflecting this vision we have? So, in a way, every institution, even schools, must do this. Schools are a very normal thing.

They have their own languages and curricula, and so on — they’re very top-down. There’s no innovation or improvisation. But at the same time, we now have a lot of activities.

Even in kindergarten, there are activities to encourage interaction with other schools, and so on. It’s a way of making the other a part of your everyday life. But I think this is a big transformation of art.

Because, I also think it must be said that this transformation doesn’t come from politics. Politicians often only support a project once it has already gained some traction. When there’s a discourse, they can feel that they can now support it.

So the important thing is changing the discourse beforehand. I think this is something that has been achieved on a large scale in the last 10 years.

Photo: (source: Block 14, Assen Nikolov)

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