KKND Slovenia's video: Slovenia: Park of Military History Pivka Part 1: ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE

The Park of Military History is a new museum and tourist centre located in the old Pivka barracks complex. The barracks were built by the Kingdom of Italy around 1930 in order to defend the Rapallo border. From 1945 to 1991, the barracks were home to the Yugoslav People’s Army. The Park of Military History has been developing within the complex since 2004. Over the last couple of years, the Park of Military History has experienced an intensive development and quickly became the largest museum complex in the Republic of Slovenia as well as one of the largest military-historical complexes in this part of Europe. It displays various museum exhibits and diverse museum collections which offer visitors a unique insight into Slovenian national history as well as world history. ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE The central part of the Park of Military History is the exhibition entitled “The Road to Independence” presenting the process of gaining independence in the Republic of Slovenia with an emphasis on the independence war of 1991. The exhibition outlines Tito’s Yugoslavia as a federal state, a part of which was also the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, and introduces the Yugoslav People’s Army as the key bond with an enormous influence on the development of the state. The central focus of the exhibition is to present the main social and political events and changes in the 1980s and 1990s which resulted in Slovenia declaring its independence from Yugoslavia. The exhibition also presents the ensuing brutal military intervention of the Yugoslav Army over Slovenian territory and a strong resistance from the Slovenian Territorial Defense and the Police Force due to which Slovenia successfully protected its independence. The exhibition enables the visitor to relive war events through direct contact with some important exhibits from that time. The exhibition displaying the advance of the Yugoslav unit includes the MiG-21 aircraft, the M-84 tank and the BVP and BTR armored vehicles. The important “relics” of the 1991 war are also the Gazelle helicopter “Velenje TO-001”, being the first aircraft to defect from the Yugoslav Military Air Force, and the T-55 tank, which was part of the tank unit that spearheaded the aggression of the Yugoslav army from the Pivka barracks. The collection also comprises several other army vehicles from that period. The exhibition “The Road to Independence” was recently complemented by the 3.6-metre-long and 1.6-metre-wide scale model of the former Yugoslav underground military airbase “Željava”. The newly acquired exhibit piece illustrates the mightiness of one of the largest military infrastructure projects in the former Yugoslavia which was until recently wrapped in a veil of mystery.