Zalesnik Foiba

After the Second World War, numerous extrajudicial killings of defeated collaborators and civilians labelled as opponents took place in Yugoslavia. Many were executed and thrown into deep karst pits or sinkholes (foibe in Italian), which were used as mass graves. Today, the word foiba carries a strong historical and political resonance, symbolising both the killings themselves and the memory conflicts that followed.

The largest and most infamous of these in the Goriška region is the Zalesnik foiba, located along the road between the villages of Nemci and Lokve (on the right-hand side of the road). In May 1945, a large number of people deported from Gorizia were thrown into it — their exact number remains unknown.

Avtor: Blaž Kosovel