7: Pivka // A Cheerful Day of War
‘“The Soviet Union was very clever when it came to designing heavy machinery, especially tanks. This tank for instance, the driver was sat lower to the ground, allowing for more control and more operating space for the rest of the soldiers in the tank. It also meant that being a Soviet tank driver was one of the most dangerous roles in World War II, with a life expectancy of eight minutes”
I’ve tossed and turned over that statement for half a decade now. It was almost certainly said, as I instantly replied that I had written songs longer than that. Did the guide get his information right? Maybe he meant eight weeks? Either way, that sucks, but eight weeks is a lot better than eight minutes. 80,632 minutes better, to be exact. I’m not going to sit in my comfortable chair and argue that a Soviet tank driver had a decent life, but eight minutes? All of the yikes, pile it up.
Pivka is a name synonymous with two things, seemingly different things that share no small amount of similarities. I’ll start with one of the most traditional culinary experiences in the region, albeit one that nobody wants to talk about because heavily processed food has gone way, way out of fashion. There was a time when the convenience of Perutnina Pivka (poultry salami, I guess) would have garnered plaudits and acclaim alike, and that time was 1959. The first chicken meat was produced in 1963 and the name became attached to processed meat throughout Yugoslavia, and you can make your own mind up about the positives and negatives of that. Either way, modern gastronomic trends and opinions have put a burden on the factories, good news for chickens but bad news for employment statistics and community mental health.
The other, is military history. Processed chicken meat and military history are two very different things, but I’d be lying if the ‘lining millions of innocent souls up to be slaughtered for convenience’ didn’t light up for both. That’s what war is, right? Disagreements between wealthy people leading to poor people being killed by other poor people. Resource disputes that impact the many and leave the few to reminisce. The churning of flesh and bone for a convenient outcome that isn’t particularly nutritious or easy to keep down.
Military cynicism is to be expected from a coward, but the Pivka Military History Park was talking in clear voice to a childish nature, to a young boy wide-eyed at tanks, helicopters, submarines and death counts. The vast complex was actually built by the Italian Army between the wars, as Benito Mussolini looked to shore up his fascist borders with the construction of the Alpine Wall. Pivka was essentially a town on the wall, an enviable position in times of peace but a proper shitshow when war inevitably kicked off.
If Mussolini hoped that his Alpine Wall would protect Italy during World War II, he was predictably wrong. The nature of WWDos was a world away from that of WWUno, and the idea of camping out along trenches and walls was no longer the way to fight. The Alpine Wall stood largely in silence during World War II, before becoming obsolete at the end of the Cold War. Today, it occasionally juts out from the greenery of the Slovenian countryside, a reminder of a time when military obliteration was a real fear.
The barracks that the Italian Army built eventually came to house the Pivka Military History Park, a tremendous museum complex that manages to avoid the obvious pitfalls of a military museum - namely vainly showing off violent destructive machines - and delivers its exhibits in a carefully weighted manner, balancing information with aesthetics in a most subtle manner. Claims of Soviet tank driver life expectancy aside, obviously.
I wandered around the complex for a while, taking in the conveyer belt of machinery with a strange combination of interest and numbness. Most museums do this to the curious, as the sheer number of exhibits meshes into one in a brain struggling with information overload. The tanks were the first thing to jump out, but looking at a room full of tanks doesn’t breed any thought more impressive than ‘wow, tanks are cool’.
Most of the tanks were ex-Yugoslav People’s Army beasts, low rumblers built during the Cold War that hadn’t moved for a long while, occasionally repurposed for the 10-day war that saw Slovenia gain its independence from Yugoslavia, in June and July of 1991. A 10-day war that scuffles barely a footnote in European history books but opened the door to years of violence that blackened the continent’s eyes and credibility. A gateway war.
A gateway war but a war nonetheless, with casualties pushing the three figures and severing trust between generations of friends and family. The war flavoured a number of the exhibits at the military museum but never dominated, a fairly typically Slovene way of doing things, always there but never demanding.
The tour moved to the yard, where a Una-class submarine sat ready and waiting to be explored. The crowning glory of the park, this so-called midget submarine was built in the 1980s with the aim of laying small minefields and transporting personnel in shallow waters, although Yugoslavia fell apart before much use could be made. Only six were built, each named after a Yugoslav river, each moved to Montenegro once the wars began, each out of service completely by 2005.
It was my first time in a submarine, although that shouldn’t be a huge surprise. How many opportunities does one get to enter a submarine? The answer should be minimal, much like the space within a submarine. I was told that the submarine (Zeta P-913, to be exact) could transport up to six commandos, a realisation that commandos were either shorter than the average human or more malleable than flesh and bone should be. Life in a submarine was claustrophobic, nerve-ridden, cramped, slow. The end was anonymous.
Not things to think while enjoying the exhibits on show at Pivka Park of Military History, although ‘enjoy’ might not be the best use of the term. These were all machines designed with murder in mind, in a blunt manner. The tour ended with a meal in the canteen and a look around the shop, where I was handed a military-issue sweater that may have weighed as much as I did. The guide told me about a Japanese man who once bought one of everything in the shop, a claim as insane as the life expectancy of a Soviet tank driver but equally mad enough to be true.
