intangible cultural heritage

Iron from War

area : Soca valley
category : traditional craftmanship
Today’s collectors have a rich knowledge about wartime events, artifacts and historical figures.
Bovec valley was, in 1915, in the grip of 29 months of First World War fighting. After the war ended an opaque pile of iron remained everywhere, from the bottom of the valleys to the mountaintops.
Metal left behind from Isonzo Front can still be found, impossible to remove completely. This is because the uninvited guest moved into the features of the landscape. The iron still covers roofs on old barns, is bourne in door lintels or rusts in garden fences. When refugees from battles around Bovec returned to the desolate former battleground, they immediately started to use iron as a construction material, afterwards as a source of secondary or primary income, and eventually iron artifacts became a subject of collectable passion.
On the fields, people were faced with piles of iron that had to be cleaned up, and selling this iron become very handy, as iron has always had its price. From higher elevations they firstly brought only more expensive metal, but finally also iron. Of course, everything could not be collected and a lot of military equipment, including ordnance, is still resting somewhere underground.
With the commercial aggregation of metals, the first “collections” of still usable light weapons were created, and of course of craft and agricultural tools, which were made from very high quality materials and are still in use today.
After World War II, there followed something of an era of collectors - ‘želézarji’, those not collecting iron per kilogram but searching for items with stories. Today’s collectors therefore have a rich knowledge about wartime events, artifacts and historical figures. After Slovenian independence, when the previously ignored Isonzo Front gained its place in history, the real luxury of a long collector’s effort was revealed, as witnessed by the rich stories in museums and private collections, which are far from just about iron.
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