Former Cold War borders fall away in new Europe

[Elphaba]

Posted: 12/21/07 at 9:34am

Frontiers in east Europe once guarded by machineguns and barbed wire in the Cold War fell away on Friday as nine mostly former communist states joined the EU's border-free zone amid fireworks, cheers and music.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself from ex-communist East Germany, hailed as historic a move seen by many as a final lifting of the old Iron Curtain.

From midnight, the nine joined 15 existing members to create an area one third the size of the United States, allowing passport-free travel for 4,000 km (2,500 miles) from Estonia to Portugal.

The extension of the European Union's so-called Schengen zone brought in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Malta, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia....

"At the Slovak-Austrian Petrzalka/Bergen crossing, people got souvenir stamps in their passports."



The ancestral home of my partners family is Petrzalka.......





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