North of the civil cemetery at Čepovan, the Austro-Hungarian World War I cemetery is situated. Valentin Pirec, the parish priest of that time, wrote in the Čepovan parish chronicle: “In November 1916, a field hospital (Feldspital) for 300 patients was erected next to the church on the east side, and a cemetery was arranged in its vicinity. There were many death cases in winter. The bodies were buried at Bajer, or Tomažet’s field, or north and south of the cemetery.”
After the end of the war, the Italian authorities had the soldiers at minor cemeteries on the Banjšice plateau exhumed and transferred to the military cemetery at Čepovan, which thus came to be rather extended. Buried in the cemetery are 2,350 soldiers of different nations, 534 of them are unidentified. Documents with the names of the buried had been kept by the Čepovan mayoralty, but its archives were burnt at the end of World War II.
After World War II, the headstones were removed and used as building material. Only the central monument, shaped as a stone pyramid, has been preserved. In 1982, the cemetery was renovated.
Register of the Fallen Soldiers
The military cemetery Čepovan lies next to the civil cemetery adjacent to the church of St. John the Baptist at the northern fringe of Čepovan. To reach the cemetery easily, start either from Nova Gorica towards Grgar and further towards Čepovan, or go from Most na Soči or from Kanal ob Soči across Banjšice.
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