One of WWI's bloodiest frontlines

By Kirsten Amor

Looking at Slovenia’s Soča Valley today, with its aquamarine river rapids, waterfalls gently tumbling down steep cliffs and dense, overgrown emerald forests, I had a hard time imagining that the area once resembled the barren and grey Soča Valley of Ernest Hemingway's novel, A Farewell to Arms:

“There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with autumn.”

What’s even more difficult to imagine is that the valley was once part of the Isonzo Front, one of the bloodiest frontlines in WWI. Approximately 1.7 million soldiers died or were mutilated for life fighting on the Isonzo Front, many losing their lives attempting to navigate the steep mountain slopes, fight through whiteout blizzards or traverse unsurpassable canyons.

Gorizia and Nova Gorica
Let’s bring together, what belongs together?

Tina Gotthardt and EUSTORY youth academy 2013

Until the end of the Second World War, Gorizia was Gorica, a Slovenian town, cultural, administrative, and economical center of the region. But in 1947, in the framework of the Paris Peace Treaties, the new borders between Italy and Yugoslavia resulted into a dramatic change: Gorica became Gorizia and part of Italy. The loss of the urban center of that region on the Yugoslavian side made it necessary to build a new town. As a political statement and manifestation of the bipolar world order in the second half of the 20th century, Nova Gorica was constructed right on the other side of the border. A mirror?