The Eleventh Volume of Episkop speaks about routes and borders which are always closely intertwined—they complement each other, contradict or support one another, they can be parallel or enmeshed. If we follow a route, sooner or later we will reach a border. At times, routes turn into borders and vice versa; borders, despite their defining role, sometimes pave the way.  Borders and routes exist in a perpetual dialogue, their harmony or discord shaping the qualities of the space they traverse—the hollows, plains and ridges of our present, as well as the contours of remembered and imagined landscapes. Seen through this dialogue, Goriška emerges as a peculiar space—marked by shifting images of places, people and things that together compose a vital chapter in Europe's cultural, economic and political story. This is a region of connections between territories and their inhabitants, between economies and culture, between East and West, North and South. Simply put, this is a truly borderoute landscape.

Yet, when we speak of the history of borders and routes, it often feels as though those historical lines lie somewhere distant, safely sealed within the sediment of bygone years, tucked into novels and archives of curiosities, no longer seeping into the present. We imagine that new paths belong to our own time, and that the borders we cross today are fresh inventions. It turns out that we are mistaken. When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, familiar borders hardened, redrawing the contours of an old Europe. The line between Gorizia and Nova Gorica reappeared overnight, suddenly sharp again. A few years later, when a wildfire raged across the high Karst plateau, the borders and routes of empires began to bleed through cracks that were too deep to mend. The cries of long-buried shrapnel shells, carried here by the military routes, burst into the open. Some with a bang, others, the empty ones that sometimes contained diaries, newspapers or dictionaries instead of bullets, just peered curiously into the year 2024 as the flames devoured the plateau. And then the rain came. When it washed the soot and ash from the scorched earth, a crossed hammer and sickle appeared on the slope of Fajti hrib, between the villages of Renče and Kostanjevica, west of the monumental stone-made inscription of the late Yugoslav president Tito’s name. A carefully laid stone wall, visible to souls hovering high above the plateau, recalled a long-forgotten act of the voluntary labour brigades—glances of young love, sweat-drenched bodies and a faith in the future now buried somewhere deep in the past.