The ‘Remember Me’ Museum

An unreasonable border is a painful memory.

After World War II when, based on the resolutions of the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, a new border was established between the then Yugoslavia and Italy, the US Army drew up one of history’s most unreasonable borderlines. In the Miren village, the new border crossed the cemetery and somebody, without any feeling for human dignity whatsoever, drew the line literally between graves. It was not before 1975 that the border which had divided the living and the dead was moved, in the framework of the Treaty of Osimo, to the cemetery’s edge.

After World War II, the Miren cemetery was also world renowned as the location of massive illegal emigration to Italy and other developed countries where those leaving were aspiring for a better life. In the 1948–1955 period, when the border was most strictly guarded, over 30,000 people were caught illegally crossing the border, on their way from Yugoslavia to Italy, and more than 20,000 people in the opposite direction.

The museum located at the Miren cemetery is dedicated to all those who suffered due to the border, those who were prevented from visiting their family grave by the border, those for whom the border symbolised a journey into the unknown, and all those who, while illegally crossing the border, lost their hope, freedom and also their life.