Find Your Grave – Presentation of the database of fallen soldiers, featuring a screening of the film “Niso letele ptice”

EPICenter, the Epic Interpretive Center, and the Foundation “Walk of Peace in the Soča Region” cordially invite you on Thursday, April 23 at 7:00 PM to EPICenter (Kolodvorska pot 10, Nova Gorica) for a presentation of a project within the official EKOK programme, focusing on the research of Austro-Hungarian military cemeteries as well as German and Italian ossuaries along the Soča Front.

Between 2005 and 2007, the Foundation “Walk of Peace in the Soča Region,” together with the Tolmin Museum, researched ten military cemeteries in the Upper Soča Valley. In recent years, the foundation has continued this work in cooperation with ZRC SAZU, focusing on the southern part of the front. At the end of 2025, a new online database of soldiers who fell on the Soča Front was launched, currently presenting lists of soldiers buried in military cemeteries in the Gorizia region and the Karst.

The work carried out so far and the research of military cemeteries will be presented by historian Mihael Uršič, joined by Igor Dolenc, a researcher of the history of the World War I hinterland in the Trieste Karst. They will also present the lists of fallen soldiers and methods of searching for information, primarily intended for descendants of the fallen.

The event will continue with a screening of the documentary film Birds Did Not Fly, directed by Anja Medved and Nadja Velušček. The film was made in 1999, when it was still possible to speak with people in their nineties who had been children during the Soča Front. It tells a story of war, but more than death, it speaks about life and the primal instinct that drives us to help living beings in distress. Their memories of the beginning of the war, displacement into exile, and returning to destroyed homes are filled with such life-affirming moments.

The film’s research was guided by the publication The Exiled, in which author Vili Prinčič collected the memories of refugees from Gorizia during World War I. Their testimonies in the film are complemented by family photographs and other written sources: records by the Austrian war correspondent Alice Schalek, the diary of Lucia Bortolotti from Gorizia, the memoirs of writer Alojzij Res, and articles from contemporary newspapers. Valuable documents also include archival footage of the разрушed city of Gorizia and photographs of surrounding villages razed to the ground.

The event will be held in slovenian language.

You are kindly invited.