Kobarid Museum

The Kobarid Museum is devoted to the Soča Front — the 29-month battle that consumed the upper Isonzo Valley from 1915 to 1917, killing hundreds of thousands. The permanent exhibition covers the geography of the front, the conditions faced by soldiers on both sides, the technical innovations developed here (including some of the first uses of poison gas on the Italian front), and the catastrophic collapse of the Italian lines at the Battle of Caporetto in October 1917.

The presentation is quiet and serious, using maps, photographs, equipment, and personal accounts. There is no glorification of war. The room devoted to the casualties — arranged as a simple list of the dead, without ranks or nationalities — is one of the most affecting museum spaces in the country.

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A story
The Kobarid Museum won the Council of Europe Museum Prize in 1993 — the first and, at the time, only non-Western European museum to do so. The judges noted that it presented the history of a devastating war in a way that was neither triumphalist nor despairing, and that it honoured the dead of both sides with equal respect. It remains one of the finest small museums in Europe.