Görlitz and Gorizia: A tale of two cities
One on the German-Polish border. One on the Italian-Slovenian frontier. Divided by war, forgotten by history, reunited in the spirit of Europe. Two cities that never knew they were sisters, until now.
“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.” - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Standing in the middle
There is a bridge in Görlitz that crosses 80 metres of river and a century of history.
On one side: Germany. The baroque spires, the sandstone façades, the quiet of a city that is provincial now, but was once a rich mercantile and industrial centre, at the crossroads of important commercial roads and religious routes1. On the other: Poland. Zgorzelec — which was, until May 1945, the eastern half of the same city.
When I stood in the middle of that bridge, I knew I was standing on a contested border between two countries. And yet what I felt was something different: that I was standing in the middle of one city, one world, something singular and hard to name. One side speaks German, the other Polish. But not divided. Not anymore, and perhaps not ever entirely.
I was standing at the heart of Europe. A heart shaped by borders that shifted, and then - slowly, incompletely, against all expectation - began to dissolve. A heart that speaks multiple languages because this is what Europe is: not a nation, but a kaleidoscope.
I felt at home. A home very similar to the one I grew up in, 600 km south of Görlitz.
Borders moved. Then people were moved to match them.
Everyone knows about the Berlin Wall. It has become the symbol: the image we reach for when we want to talk about Europe divided, about the Iron Curtain, about what the Cold War looked like in concrete and barbed wire.
But Berlin was not the only city torn apart.
The Oder–Neisse line — the border imposed at Potsdam in 1945, running along two rivers — did not just draw a new map. It amputated living cities. It severed neighbourhoods from their own railway stations. It separated families on a Tuesday morning with no warning and no goodbye. And it involved one of the largest forced population transfers in modern European history — a double movement, choreographed by Stalin’s hand. Twelve to fourteen million Germans were expelled from territories east of the line, in conditions that historians now classify as ethnic cleansing.
But they were not moving into a vacuum: the Poles who replaced them had themselves been expelled from the eastern borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union. Entire communities from Lwów, Wilno, Grodno were packed onto trains heading west, to fill cities they had never seen, in houses whose previous owners had just been forced out. Most people living today in what was historical Prussia and Silesia — in Zgorzelec, in Wrocław, in Szczecin — were not born there, and neither were their parents. Borders moved. Then people were moved to match them.
Görlitz lost its eastern half overnight. In the spring of 1945, as the Red Army advanced, retreating German forces blew the Neisse crossings; when the rubble cleared and the border hardened, what had been a short walk to the market, to relatives, to the station became first a controlled crossing, then a barrier, then a ghost.
What made this wound harder to name was politics. The GDR and Poland were officially fraternal socialist states; to speak of the Oder–Neisse border as a trauma was to question the legitimacy of the post-war order itself. The loss could not be names: silence was required instead.
After 1989, the story changed, but the loss remained. The Two Plus Four Treaty of 1990 made Germany's eastern border definitive. The division would not be undone. What remained to be built was a different kind of wholeness.
Three names, one city
Go six hundred kilometres south and you find a similar wound.
Gorizia. They called it the “Austrian Nice”: a Habsburg city of elegant villas, multilingual cafés, and aristocrats who wintered there for the mild climate and the cultivated air. A Friulian, Mitteleuropean jewel — provincial in scale, of cosmopolitan habits. The region I come from.
In 1947, Gorizia was cut in two.
The division became operative on 15 September, when the Paris Peace Treaty entered into force. The Iron Curtain ran through the city’s centre. The railway station — the Transalpina, the grand Habsburg terminal — ended up on the Yugoslav side. What remained in Italy was a city without its eastern lungs, stripped of its hinterland and dependent on subsidies. On the other side, the Yugoslav authorities built Nova Gorica as a socialist counter-city made of concrete and tall buildings. Not so different from Zgorzelec, Görlitz’s Polish twin.
There is something that tends to get overlooked: the names themselves make these cities unwitting twins.
Gorizia and Gorica both trace to the Proto-Slavic root gora — mountain, hill — a reminder that Slavic-speaking communities named and shaped these places long before empires arrived to rename them. Görlitz appears in medieval sources as Gorelic, Gorlicz, Gorliz. These cities are mirrors down to their etymology.
Gorizia, in fact, carries three names simultaneously: Gorizia in Italian, Görz in German, Gorica in Slovenian. This is the signature of the region I come from — Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the only European region where the three great cultural traditions of the continent meet without one cancelling the others: Latin, Germanic, Slavic. A lived reality, written into street signs, surnames, dialects, and the way people move between languages without thinking about it.
Görlitz knows something of the same layering.
The Sorbs — a Slavic minority who have lived in the region for over a millennium — are still there, their language still spoken, their dual signage still visible on roads and village squares. Another place where Europe did not resolve into a single identity, because it never was one.
Their sovereignty histories are equally layered. Görlitz passed from Slavic settlement to the Margraviate of Meissen, spent its long golden age under the Crown of Bohemia, shifted to Saxony in 1635, and became Prussian in 1815.
Gorizia moved from the Patriarchate of Aquileia to the County of Gorizia, then four Habsburg centuries — with brief Venetian and Napoleonic interruptions — before being annexed to Italy after the First World War.
In neither city was sovereignty ever simple. In both, it was always contested, always layered, always plural. European.
Two cities, two thinkers the world was not ready for
In Görlitz, there is a house where a cobbler once lived. Jacob Böhme was born in 1575 in a village outside the city and spent his working life resoling shoes near the Görlitz market. He was also, in his free hours, a mystic who wrote about the unity of opposites: how light needs darkness to be visible, how no thing can know itself without its other.
His central insight — that division is not the final truth of the world, that light and darkness need each other, that God himself contains both wrath and love as two faces of the same fire — did not make him popular in his lifetime.
He once wrote: “In Yes and No all things consist.”
The Lutheran clergy of Görlitz found this intolerable: a non-binary thinker in a world that prefers binary thinking and turns it into war and persecution. Sounds familiar?
He was expelled from the city, accused of heresy. He came back. He kept writing. He is buried in the old city cemetery, and people still come from around the world to pay homage, leaving fresh flowers on the stone.
What the city could not give him in life, the history of ideas gave him in death. Hegel absorbed Böhme’s dialectic of opposites and built an entire philosophy on it. Schelling read him and admired. Novalis kept him as a reference. William Blake, in England, had him as inspiration. Some called him the greatest mystic Germany ever produced.
A cobbler from Görlitz became one of the hidden sources of modern European thought — the kind of influence that runs underground for generations, then surfaces in unexpected places.
Gorizia did not produce a mystic; it produced something more tragic: a philosopher who felt the contradictions too acutely to survive them. Carlo Michelstaedter was born there in 1887 into a Jewish family at the height of Habsburg cosmopolitanism. At twenty-three, on the day he completed his philosophy thesis — a work about the impossibility of authentic existence in a world of compromise — he shot himself. He died almost entirely unknown, his manuscript unpublished, his name unread.
Today, that thesis — La persuasione e la rettorica (Persuasion and Rhetoric) — is considered one of the most original works of early twentieth-century European philosophy. Scholars in Italy, Germany, France, and beyond have spent decades excavating what he meant: can we ever stop chasing the future and truly be ourselves in the present, or are we forever trapped living behind the fake masks and social scripts that society calls "normal life"?
Böhme and Michelstaedter: one expelled in his lifetime and vindicated by posterity; one who died in obscurity and was recognised only after. Both cities produced thinkers the world was not ready for. Both, eventually, caught up.
Pensionopolis
There is a word — a concept, really — that appears in the history of both cities: Pensionopolis. A city of pensioners. Of people who have retired from active life and chosen a beautiful, quiet, civilised place to grow old gracefully
Görlitz was this for Prussian bureaucrats and Silesian industrialists. Gorizia was this for Habsburg officials and Viennese aristocrats seeking Mediterranean warmth without the chaos of Italy proper. Both cities built their identities around a kind of dignified stability — fine architecture, pleasant streets, a cultivated air, good food and wine.
That stability was not merely social. It was atmospheric. Görlitz had the temperate calm of a river town in a soft landscape, far from capitals and frontiers that shout. Gorizia sold itself on climate — mild winters, gardens, the promise that the body could slow down without shrinking. Tranquillity, in both places, was a resource.
And tranquillity, in turn, funded culture. The long, unhurried lives of officials, retirees and rentiers supported the institutions that make a city feel greater than it is: libraries, learned societies, reading rooms, musical and literary circles. In Görlitz, the Oberlausitzische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften — founded in 1779, one of the oldest scientific societies in the German-speaking world — left a legacy that survives in the extraordinary collections now housed in the Kulturhistorisches Museum and the Oberlausitzische Bibliothek der Wissenschaften: one of those Central European libraries whose shelves are a portrait of the city that built them.
In Gorizia too, the cultivated air was made tangible in salons, archives, and the patient work of small institutions that kept multilingual, Mitteleuropean memory alive long after empire had gone.
These were not cities of revolution or rupture. They were cities of continuity — of the long, slow accumulation of culture. Which is perhaps why rupture hit them so hard. And why, perhaps, they have survived it with such quiet resilience.
Little Jerusalem
There is another border that does not show on maps: the sudden disappearance of a minority that once made a city feel larger, freer, and more cosmopolitan than its size suggested.
In both Görlitz and Gorizia, Jewish life was woven into the fabric of the city — into trade, scholarship, music, publishing, the long middle-class rhythm of Central Europe — until it was cut out in the twentieth century.
In Görlitz, the Neue Synagoge — built between 1909 and 1911, in the Jugendstil confidence of a community that believed in its own future — surprisingly survived the November 1938 pogroms. The community was destroyed; the building was abandoned and decayed for decades. But the shell remained, waiting. After reunification, restoration began slowly, then with greater urgency. By 2021, the synagogue had reopened as the Kulturforum Görlitzer Synagoge: a living civic space, open for concerts and conferences.
In Gorizia, the Jewish presence is older still — documented for centuries, shaped by the Habsburg world, marked by a ghetto in the early modern period, and later by a cultural prominence out of proportion to the community's size. The city earned a nickname that sounds like both pride and myth: Gerusalemme sull'Isonzo, the “Little Jerusalem on the Isonzo”. The synagogue on Via Ascoli, dating from 1756, is modest on the outside and intimate within. Today, part of it houses a museum that takes the nickname as its title: a reminder that the Isonzo valley held not only trenches and nationalisms, but also Hebrew books, and conversations in Italian, German, Slovenian, Yiddish and Venetian, nurtured by a small community of rabbis, journalists and philosophers.
Here too, the story ends in rupture: the racial laws, the German occupation after September 1943, and the deportations to the death camps in November that year.
Görliwood, and other stories
Even before you learn its history, Görlitz announces itself through its architecture. The compact, walkable, largely renovated historic centre offers a compressed survey of Central European urban culture across five centuries: late Gothic and Renaissance gabled houses around the Untermarkt and Obermarkt, Saxon baroque in the church towers, Prussian classicism in the civic buildings, and an unexpectedly Italianate note in certain palazzo-like façades along the Neisse.
Add the turn-of-the-century Jugendstil quarters built before 1914, and you have a city that looks, from a certain angle, exactly like a stage set.
That is what film-makers discovered. Görlitz has been used as a location so often that it earned a nickname: Görliwood. Most famously, it was Wes Anderson’s canvas for The Grand Budapest Hotel: the extraordinary Art Nouveau Kaufhaus serves as the film’s fictional hotel, its ornate staircase and gilded interiors preserved as if the twentieth century had simply forgotten to arrive.
Gorizia is a different kind of palimpsest, yet somehow parallel. The medieval Castello (eleventh century) presides over a borgo with Gothic traces; in the centre, the baroque Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio anchors a piazza that could be in Styria; Palazzo Attems Petzenstein and Palazzo Coronini Cronberg carry a Habsburg domestic sensibility — sober, intimate, slightly melancholy. Then there are the Liberty villas, the interwar rationalist buildings, and the unmistakable grain of a border town.
Open borders
In 2004, the European Union expanded eastward. Poland and Slovenia joined.
In Görlitz, a pedestrian bridge was built — the one you cross today to head to the sunnier side of the Neisse, to eat in one of the small restaurants on the Polish side, to have an ice cream, or simply to be in two countries at once without anyone asking why. In Gorizia, the fence that divided the two cities was replaced with flower pots and signposts. Slowly, the borders became permeable again. What decades of politics had severed, European integration was quietly stitching back together.
In 2025, Gorizia and Nova Gorica became joint European Capital of Culture under the slogan “Go Borderless”. It is not a perfect story. The wounds are not fully healed. The demographic losses, the economic distortions, and the cultural erasures of half a century do not disappear with a cultural programme.
That same year, Chemnitz also held the title of European Capital of Culture. It is hard not to think — with sympathy for Chemnitz, which has carried its own difficult history — that an opportunity was missed.
Four divided cities, united by their Slavic names and by a deeply European soul: Gorizia, Gorica, Görlitz, Zgorzelec. It would have been a beautiful programme.
So, this strange post — a photo story, a reflection, and also a rmemory of my roots — has been my way of celebrating a twinning that sooner or later others will acknowledge (I will do my part to make it happen).
For me, there was no need for ceremonies. In Görlitz, I did what I used to do in Gorizia: wandering around and, in the afternoon, sitting at a café. Both cities have wonderfully atmospheric ones. In Görlitz, Lucullus is a must — set in the historic house of Bartholomäus Scultetus, the sixteenth-century cartographer who mapped the city’s coordinates with the same patience with which Europe has mapped, and re-mapped, itself. In Gorizia, Caffè Garibaldi — despite the name — preserves an unmistakably Viennese atmosphere. The coffee is excellent. The cake, sometimes, is Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest cherry cake).
So was the one I ate in Görlitz.
That is a kind of twinning too, is it not?
Görlitz sat at the intersection of the Via Regia — the “King’s Highway” running east-west from Santiago de Compostela to Kyiv — and a major north-south trade route along the Neisse. This position made it one of the wealthiest members of the Six-City League (Oberlausitzer Sechsstädtebund), an alliance of Lusatian cities that functioned almost as a free imperial league, protecting trade routes and civic rights from the fourteenth century onward. The mercantile wealth it accumulated is still visible in every sandstone façade
I am very impressed how deeply you described both cities. Your stories are also historically accurate and balanced. Nothing to add, except my personal inspirations related to both. When it comes to Zgorzelec, you mention the Sorbs. This topic asks for expansion, or a separate article: in fact, the border town of Goerlitz/Zgorzelec is historically at the very center of Lusatia (Łużyce), the Slavic region then gradually incorporated into Sachsen and Brandenburg. The Lusatian minority still exists in Germany and, against all odds, preserves their language and identity - while on the Polish side, ironically, they pretty much died out or emigrated after 1945. When it comes to Gorizia, my first and strongest association is the haunting Italian anti-war song "O Gorizia, tu sei maladetta" speaking of the tragedy of World War 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVA_7IIoIZk
This is a very compelling and inviting way to present history. I once had an Italian barber in Boston who would sing a song about how Trieste would always be Italian! These things live on.