ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses a nation’s ignored past reflected in the form of ‘wounds’ or abandoned urban heritage. It addresses how the processes of heritagisation, appropriation, and silencing relate to the complex relations of power in a contested land where drastic change of urban population took place. Istria on the Adriatic coast in Slovenia affords an excellent opportunity to study questions related to relationships between the dominant and silenced memories, hegemonic and alternative heritages, identities, and place attachment. The process of the marginalisation of urban space and the people observed in the case study are similar to what the geographer Stanko Pelc calls the marginalisation of nature or pushing to the edge of human or, in the case, ‘urban’ priorities. During the span of the twentieth century, urban communities in former Yugoslavia as well as in all Eastern and Central Europe have experienced an almost total change from heterogenous, multi-ethnic to more or less mono-ethnic and ‘uniform’ communities.
