The Red Adriatic: the Global East in Trieste

Is Trieste – a quintessential frontier city – East, West, both or neither? In the nineteenth century this cosmopolitan port city was the point of connection between a vast imperial hinterland and the routes of global commerce; today it is, according to one famous travel writer, ‘nowhere’. This account draws special attention to Trieste’s Cold War entanglements, which made it simultaneously a beacon for the future of socialist internationalism and a bastion against ‘barbarian slavo-communist hordes’ – each version evoking a very different image of a Cold War Global East. Here Trieste embodies a micro-version of the Cold War, but with its own distinctive character. One place, but many different maps, each reflecting specific, not always congruent histories, dreams, projects and memories.