Museum on the Border
Permanent exhibitions
In 2012 the permanent exhibition Remember Me on illegal crossings of the border opened to the public at the Miren cemetery. The exhibition is dedicated to people whose lives were affected by the politics and who were looking for a better life on each of the sides of the demarcation line that literally split the Miren cemetery between the two countries after the WW2.
The ingenious ways of petty smuggling and everyday economic migration across the border is presented in the Pristava exhibition Smuggling in the Goriška Region after World War II. The local inhabitants have shared with the museum curators their memories on smuggling practices, the most popular goods such as blue jeans, coffee, washing powder, pornography, music records etc. The display in the former customs-office building includes also the escape room that reveals more details on the act of smuggling.
The Railway Station in Nova Gorica located by the border hosts the State Border in the Goriška Region 1945-2004 exhibition that opened in 2005. The building itself is a fine example of a Secession architecture, designed by a Viennese architect Robert Seelig. It was built in 1906 which makes it the oldest public building in the town of Nova Gorica. After the WW2 it fount itself on the territory of Yugoslavia.
The military watchtower in Vrtojba, however, testifies of the strict border control. It was built in 1948 and has been preserved as the smallest memorial museum in Slovenia. The collage-like exhibition focuses on the life next to the new state border demarcated in 1947, which divided the previously unified cultural, social, economic and political territory of the Goriška region into two parts.