The Curtain's Edge (Koper)

Member Name: MagdaDH

Product:	Koper
Date:	16/09/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: quite, pretty, interesting

Disadvantages: not that special

We leave Ljubljana by train to Koper, where we are going to catch a bus to Trieste. The train is, again, an old fashioned European type with compartments and we find one to share with only one other passenger, a serious looking young man seemingly engrossed in a book about astronomy.

Slovenia has only about 50km of coast, and Koper is the only commercial port of note, located virtually on the Italian border and a scant 10 km from Trieste. The distance from Ljubljana isn't far either, but the train stops frequently and its route somehow meanders on the way and thus it takes over two hours to get there.

But we don't mind: between Ljubljana and the coast is the elevated plateau of Slovenian Karst, picturesque wooded hills and rocky outcrops, and underground the limestone caves of which Postojna is the best know and most popular. It's another scenic route in our schedule, getting even more attractive as we near the Adriatic and glimpses of the sea become visible between the hills.

The young man with whom we share the compartment is a philosophy student from Koper called Bratko and we are soon engaged in a lively conversation about Koper itself (which he recommends seeing), politics of the EU (which he is sceptical about), British weather (which he deplores), European leftist thought (which always seems surprisingly vigorous to anybody that comes from the Anglo-Saxon world, the land of Mrs Thatcher's TINA), British mining strikes of the 80's (which he doesn't know about), Slovenian and Polish Catholicism (which we both share somehow parallel commiserations on) and the only Slovene philosopher I have ever heard of, Slavoj Zizek (who is, it seems, even more controversial in his homeland than abroad).

We get off the train in Koper greeted by Bratko's cheerful "welcome to Italy" and decide to follow Bratko's recommendation and venture into the town centre, having left our gear in the lockers at the train station.

It's quite a walk, especially with two children and in the middle of the August heat, but we plod on towards the church tower visible in the distance, past commercial buildings, big-box stores (Lidl has clearly conquered more corners of Europe than any other supermarket including Tesco) and low grade business-traveller hotels. A lot around us looks new, clean and fresh; new road intersections, newly laid patches of grass, a large building (a future shopping centre?) is coming up next to the road. The outskirts of Koper don't look attractive but suggest a busy and thriving workaday town.

We reach the old town, eventually, and it is a pleasant contract to the nondescript commercial outskirts. Narrow alleyways twist up towards the central square and just like in Croatian Dalmatia, the whole place has a distinctly Italian feel to it (it was under a Venetian rule for several centuries) compounded by the fact that all the official signs are bilingual - the central square is, somehow incredibly, Titov Trg aka Piazza Tito.

Whether Trg or Piazza, a very handsome square it is, flanked by attractive Venetian buildings: a 15th century Praetorian Palace, a cathedral church and a Loggia, - unfortunately hardly visible as it is undergoing some work and the whole front of the building is covered with a tarp, on which a printed image hints at the outline of the building behind.

The church has a climbable tower, so it only seems de rigeur that we climb it to get the views and better bearings. As it almost invariably is the case, the views are worth the climb as we see across Koper's small but busy commercial port (I like ports, actually. It's the one type of industrial landscape that I find strangely attractive in the way that a HGV service station or a meat processing plant cannot ever be) towards the mountains and along the coast to Trieste.

Towards the seafront, we spy what seems to be a Roman site nestled between the Venetian buildings. Koper does, indeed, go back to the Romans, and its modern Slovene and Croat name hark back to the Latin Capris or Caprae (a place of goats). Later on it became a capital of Venetian Istria and thus its Italian name, Capodistria. It started as an island settlement, separated from the mainland by marshes with salt-producing evaporation pans. The last of the salt pans were finally abandoned in the early 20th century, but most of the marshes were drained under the Hapsburg rule in the 19th century, with Koper's importance diminished with the fall of the Venetian republic and raise of Trieste's role as a port.

The town itself looks good from above too, its origins as an island become clear from this vantage point and we can clearly see the oval of the tightly packed buildings of the old town surrounded by the more spacious outlying districts. We also realise how far the train and bus stations actually are and I start a sneaky plot to take a taxi back.

We stroll through quiet, picturesque streets towards the slightly busier seafront, directed to a fashionable cafe with comfy leather sofas and deep armchairs by a friendly young man chatting to the girl selling tower tickets. The coffee is good, the ice cream, frappe and desert menu mind-bogglingly colourful and elaborate, the beer expensive and the vibe of fashionable chic: not unexpectedly, both children manage to spill their drinks (one of them being a VERY creamy apricot frappe) at the same time, and thus we leave the Kaptian's Canteen in a mild disgrace.


My taxi plot comes to nothing as the centre is largely pedestrianised and the whole of the town seems somehow deserted, so we so we end up walking back in the only slightly diminished heat of the afternoon, and as we misjudge the time just a little bit the walk has to periodically break into something of a desperate trot, what with a three year old on the shoulders and an eight year old complaining of a stitch in progressively fainter whines some two hundred yards behind us.

But we do make it with about five minutes to spare to buy the tickets, recover the luggage and get some water. Miraculously recovered bigger one jumps up an down excitedly by the pop-corn machine in which she decided to spend some of her Euros, while the little one promises that no, he definitely doesn't need the toilet and his pants are all dry, look.

Soon we are on-board the Trieste bus, a comfortable and mercifully air conditioned vehicle. We pass what used to be the border checkpoint on the motorway, now deserted and not needed. Churchill's famous speech mentioned Trieste: we have just crossed the what used to be the Iron Curtain. But the curtain is no more. I recall Bratko's doubts about the EU: perhaps one needs to remember when such posts were staffed on both sides with uniformed and armed guards, solemnly and often menacingly leafing through one's passports to appreciate the joy and freedom of such open borders.

***

I wouldn't go out of may way to visit Koper itself, although I am sure the town and its surroundings would afford a few pleasant days. For anybody passing through it's well worth at least few hours.

Summary: For anybody passing through it's well worth at least few hours.