Timothy Phillips

What I learnt from retracing the iron curtain

  • From Spectator Life
The Berlin Wall, taken from West Berlin showing the death strip in 1988 (Getty)

Just before the pandemic, I spent several months travelling through Europe from the north of Norway to Istanbul and beyond to Azerbaijan. I saw unforgettable sights: the endless daylight of the Arctic summer; the vast Hammershus castle on the Danish island of Bornholm; Vienna’s ornate Prunksaal library; and the sandy beaches of Corfu.

But the focus of my journey was precisely those things that most travellers to these places often ignore. I was following the route of the Iron Curtain. My aim was to visit every part of that old great divide, all the places where NATO once abutted the Warsaw Pact, where overwhelming military might stood constantly primed for apocalypse.

I wanted to understand how this epochal division had operated in practice, what it had meant to the people who lived nearby, and how its legacy – physical, political and emotional – has continued to make itself felt in the present.

The residents of Norway’s eastern Finnmark county told me that even after the Cold War they still never looked across the border into Russia for fear of attracting unwanted attention.

I visited the remnants of the Berlin Wall but I also spent time in other divided cities, towns and villages. The so-called ‘Little Berlin’ of Mödlareuth was perhaps the most poignant. A Berlin-style wall once ran round its duck pond. For absurdity nowhere could beat the fortified border between Italy and Yugoslavia as it was found in the railway station square of the twin towns of Gorizia and Nova Gorica: two systems, two countries, and one square that for 40 years no one could cross.

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Gorizia, Italy

I met people who risked their lives to escape from east to west, and I also discovered the obstacles that ordinary travellers faced when going in either direction.

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