A barren track now runs along the stretch of land between Hungary and Austria where 20 years ago the Iron Curtain started to disintegrate.

Imre Caspo guarded the frontier between communist and capitalist Europe for 23 years and now he is trying to keep some of the Cold War atmosphere alive.

He has barbed wire fence, a watchtower and a green Trabant car in his back garden which he hopes to turn into a museum which should open in time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November.

"All this new freedom, this coming and going is not my thing any more," he said nostalgically.

Fertorakos, now a quaint village, was one of the most guarded settlements in Hungary and the departure point for many dissidents fleeing to the West.

"There were guards walking on the main street, they did their patrols in cars and even on bicycles, stopping people and checking their entrance permits to the zone," Csapo, now 60, reminisced as he drove through the village. "We used to walk dozens of kilometres along these fences when we were on duty."

He and his colleagues would look for footprints left by interlopers in the carefully raked soil as they made a dash for freedom from the oppressive Communist regimes.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, putting an end to the Cold War, but the sequence of events in eastern Europe that led to the fall of the Iron Curtain began several months earlier.

Here are a few key dates:

April 5: at the end of the so-called Round Table talks in Poland, the ruling Communists and the opposition agree to legalise the Solidarnosc workers' movement, which was banned in 1982, and call the first partially democratic elections in June, which Solidarnosc sweeps.

May 2: Hungary begins pulling down the Iron Curtain, dismantling the electric alarm system and cutting through the barbed wire that have marked its border with Austria since 1966.

August 19: over 600 east Germans use the so-called Pan-European Picnic, a peaceful gathering near the Hungarian town of Sopron, to flee across the Austrian border to the west. Hungarian border guards are ordered not to shoot.

August 24: Tadeusz Mazowiecki becomes Poland's prime minister, the first non-Communist head of state in eastern Europe in over 40 years.

September 10: Hungary allows all eastern Germans through to Austria without seeking Moscow's approval. Over 50,000 people flee to the West. Pressure increases on the East German government to ease travel restrictions.

 A main gate of the open-air Iron Curtain museum is opened as the owner of the exhibition, a former border guard of the Austrian-Hungarian border, Imre Csapo, sits in a Eastern-German made Trabant in Fertorakos, some 220 kms west of Budapest

October 18: GDR leader Erich Honecker is forced to resign, less than two weeks after Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev warned the eastern German government not to be too rigid in the face of increasing liberalism throughout the region.
November 9: the Berlin Wall falls after weeks of mounting demonstrations including a mass rally of at least one million people in East Berlin on November 4.

November 17: police in Czechoslovakia launch a brutal crackdown on peaceful student protests in Prague, sparking the Velvet Revolution which culminated with ruling Communists stepping down on November 24 after days of mass protests.

December 22: Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceausescu is overthrown after days of demonstrations and deadly clashes. Ceausescu and his wife Elena are executed by firing squad on December 25 after a summary trial.

Eszter Balazs and Geza Molnar/AFP/Expatica