Nova Gorica Railway Station

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand inaugurated the Transalpina Railway Station in 1906, connecting the Austro-Hungarian Empire to its vital port at Trieste, he had no idea the building would outlive not just his empire, but also the city it was built to serve. After World War II, the 1947 Treaty of Paris drew a new border that gave the station to Yugoslavia, but left the city of Gorizia on the Italian side. So Yugoslavia simply built a new city around it: Nova Gorica, constructed from scratch as a socialist showcase. For decades, a fence split the square in front of the station, families separated by what locals called the Gorizia Wall.

The fence came down in 2004, when Slovenia joined the European Union, and the border itself dissolved further in 2007 with Schengen accession. What’s left is a circular mosaic set into the pavement, marking a line pedestrians now cross without a second thought, sometimes literally with one foot in each country. In 2025, the two cities took that gesture further, jointly holding the title of European Capital of Culture, the first cross-border city pairing to do so in the program’s history. A new underpass beneath the station’s tracks, cut through where a wall used to run, now carries cyclists and commuters between the two downtowns in about a minute. The empire that built the station is long gone. The border it created barely qualifies as one anymore.