30th anniversary of the kobarid museum

Dear visitors and friends of museum,

We entered the year of our 30th anniversary full of ideas and plans, how we will celebrate 30 years of preservation of the heritage of the Isonzo Front and simultaneously honour the memory on 29 months of fights along the Soča River around hundred years ago during the Great War.  

From its beginning in 1990 the Kobarid museum is central point of the museum presentation of heritage of the Isonzo Front and is one of the most visited Slovenian museums. Museum developed into presentation collection, received The Council of Europe Museum Prize and nomination for the Europe’s museum of the year. The Kobarid museum story is a story of success that subtly speaks about the history of the town and its surroundings, which marked not only the region, but left an important mark in Europe. In 30 years, more than 1.700.000 visitors entered through the museum’s doors.

Due to the spread of the new corona virus in spring, museum closed its doors for the first time in its history for such a long time – for 50 days. When museum was open again on 1 May 2020, visitors returned and in summer visitor numbers were almost the same as in the summer a year ago. We had a very high visitor numbers also in September.

Whole year and especially in autumn, we were preparing for the solemn events for October to celebrate our 30th anniversary and 20th anniversary of The Walk of Peace. We were looking forward to solemn academy, the Day of The Kobarid Museum, inauguration of the new temporary exhibition and meeting with all of you who come to the museum and are interested in the history of the Isonzo front. We planned the solemn events for 23rd and 24th October 2020, but new wave of corona virus spread forced us to cancel all the events and postpone them. We hope that we will be able to organize some of the cancelled events later, maybe even in this year. We will notify you about the new dates.

Museum is open for now and the visit is adapted to health protecting measures. As usual each autumn we prepared a new temporary exhibition 29 months of fights along the Soča. Author of the exhibition is museum’s curator Jaka Fili, exhibition was designed by Barbara Bogataj Kokalj. We invite you to visit this interesting exhibition, which gives whole chronological view of causes, events and consequences of the Isonzo Front in the Great War. Furthermore, we prepared a revised edition of the Guide to the Kobarid Museum, which is waiting for you in the museum’s shop shelves.

Martin Šolar, director of The Kobarid Museum