St Lucia (2)

The small town in Slovenia has already been featured here. Now it’s back because an exciting photo shows one of the town’s houses. The main subject, of course, is not the house, but the Italian armored car standing in front of it.

Let’s start thinking about the car. How did it get there? According to the inscription, it’s a vehicle captured nearby. The photo doesn’t show any damage, so it was probably abandoned due to a technical fault, which is how it ended up in Austrian hands. But this is also a very shaky explanation. The area around St Lucia is mountainous, sliced by the narrow valleys of the Isonzo and other rivers. The armored car was best used on roads, and the road network here was not very dense. But it’s also unclear how Italians managed to bring the car to the front line in the valley from the main Italian defense line on the opposite mountain plateau (Kolowrat)? But as the photo shows, it was somehow brought down and then abandoned in the valley.

The other important question is the location, of the picture. St Lucia is still a very small settlement with just a few streets (its current name is Most na Soci). In the background of the picture, the mountain Bucenica can be seen rising on the other side of the Isonzo. This hill and Mengore, as well as another hill further south, formed the Tolmein bridgehead, which played a prominent role in the 1917 breakthrough, the miracle of Caporetto. Near the presumed location, you can walk online using the well-known street view program, observe the surroundings and houses. I have tried to identify the building in the picture in today’s pictures. I am attaching the best result. The orientation and mass of the building are similar, the arrangement of the windows is not, but it could have been rebuilt several times in 110 years.