Austro-Hungarian Military Cemetery Ukanc

30 min.

From the hospital on Mt. Komna, the wounded and fallen soldiers were transported into the valley by cableways that were used to supply the Isonzo Front from the Bohinj side. The area of Ukanc, where the Austro-Hungarian cemetery is located, was included in the area of war operations and to which access was very restricted and possible only with special permits. In the beginning Hotel Zlatorog, which was the only larger building in the area, housed Austro-Hungarian officers and was later turned into a recovery centre for people with minor wounds and other patients.
At the military cemetery in Ukanc, soldiers who fell on the slopes of Krn Mountain Range between July 1915 and November 1917 were buried. The majority of which were Hungarians, Poles and Ukrainians. Also among the buried, were soldiers from other nations of the Monarchy: Slovaks, Czechs, Germans, Romanians, Serbians and Slovenes. 282 graves are marked with wooden crosses, some graves are of unknown soldiers, some of prisoners of war and one civilian victim. In some graves two soldiers are buried, the last burial was registered under the number 296.
A chapel was built at the cemetery during World War I. It was renovated after the war and then again in 1990. During the war there was a German inscription on the chapel which was in 1920 replaced with a Slovene one: “Potomci! Ostanite si edini, da zaman našo nismo kri prelili.” (Posterity! Live in harmony, so our blood was not spilt in vain.). The cemetery was for a while maintained by a known local painter, Valentin Hodnik, who made and put up the first wooden crosses to mark the graves.
There are two monuments in the cemetery. On the stone one there is an inscription stating:
“Den Helden vom Krn, Verteidiger der Wochein” (In the memory of the heroes of Krn, the defenders of Bohinj). On the monument with a cross which stands in the middle of the cemetery there is a verse by Anton Golf, who was a minister in the village of Srednja vas after the war: “Tujci prej – zdaj bratje ste postali, ko so tu grobove vam skopali… žarko sevaj solnce vam planinsko, pokoj dihaj jezero bohinjsko!”(Once foreigners – now brothers you became when in the graves you were laid… Let the alpine sun shine for you and let Bohinj Lake fill you with peace).
In 1993 the cemetery was renovated. The plaques with the names of the fallen were replaced. The original plaques form a part of the exhibition “Bohinj 1914–1918” in the Tomaž Godec Museum in Bohinjska Bistrica.

Register of the Fallen Soldiers

Text: Anja Poštrak, Gorenjski muzej
Photos: Mitja Sodja, Turizem Bohinj