Comment by samastur
10 years ago
I kind of doubt that your memory is correct. In late 80s you would see police and toll officers on Yugoslavian border crossings generally armed with pistols. Army did "protect" border, but I can't think of a place where they would be anywhere close to normal border crossing and they certainly did not have crew serviced machine guns there. Both sides used to have bunkers so maybe you meant those?
Otherwise getting across wasn't difficult, just annoying because of long columns of cars. It was worse for us locals, because there was general and usually correct assumption that we were smuggling something.
I can easily think of worse recent experiences (USA, India...).
Nope - I can remember it quite vividly.
Train from Trieste to Ljubljana - stops in the middle of nowhere. After an hour or so troops turn up and surround the train, I remember watching them assemble the heavy machine gun and point it in the general direction of our carriage (mind you, the soldiers involved looked completely bored, so I didn't feel that threatened).
A chap who looked like a border guard came through with people who looked like officers (and who were in a supremely bad mood). Much shouting, waiving of pistols and people looking genuinely scared. After another couple of hours train continues on its way with everyone very puzzled.
No idea what it was about and my traveling companions hadn't encountered anything like that there before and subsequent border crossings in the next few days (e.g. Yugoslavia -> Hungary) were completely uneventful.
I can date it pretty well as it was about a week before the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea - I'm from the North East of Scotland and was worried that people I knew might have been involved. So it was about the 1st July 1988.