The walk of peace from the alps to the adriatic, a guide along the isonzo front

To the gentle reader ...

Along the Walk of Peace from the Alps to the Adriatic the past, the present and the future are intertwined and confronted with each other. The past does not only mean the 29 months of the warfare on the Isonzo Front but also includes the past of war recollections and military history of the Isonzo Front as well as its countless reflections both in Slovenian and European historical memory. These have been impressed into the landscape, the people who remained and those who had to leave, the soldiers, their commanders, the multitude of crosses, tombstones, memorial tablets with the names of the buried, into the heaps of published books and into the ways of recollecting in the countries that took part in it.

The memory either stayed in the shade of other recollections or was the central pillar of national collective memory. In some places, it gave way to the memory of the second great war of the 20th century and its resultant social changes, or it was possibly just subordinated to the uncompromising history of the defeated, the guilty and the responsible who tailored the European post-WWI history. On the other hand, this memory did neither bow to the time nor to the turbulent processes and events of the century to which the Great War paved the gory way.

In some historical recollections the memory was for decades focused on its military ego, since the Great War was the last great warfare of the Monarchy to which the Soča (Isonzo) Region had for centuries belonged and defended its western borders; in other places it was the topic of controversies and political argument; and elsewhere, a quietly smouldering intimate memory that could not be revealed for many years. For decades, even for a whole century, soldiers kept building up the memory with their stories, diaries and letters; civil population kept building it up with their experiences of exile, refugee camps, life in the direct vicinity of the front in the conditions of military occupation; histories of strategies, military battles, war decorations kept building it up; and so did life and death.

After a hundred years, the locations of the twelve Isonzo Battles underwent essential transformation: by means of a cross-border project and through the self-motivated collaboration of institutions and individuals from both sides of the onetime border river they became locations of the so desired peace – the Walk of Peace – although a century ago they were the place of unattainable aspirations, when a word about peace represented a threat to the war policy and war goals. The materialized heritage of the wartime, inscribed into the surface of the Earth, was preserved, also due to the natural characteristics, throughout the turbulent period of the tragic century of the two World Wars, with the prolongation into the 21st century which united the territory along the Soča into a space of a shared history with a variety of hues.