Fifty Hairpins and a Wooden Chapel

The road out of Kranjska Gora starts climbing within a kilometre of the last house and does not stop for twenty-four hairpin bends. Each one carries a concrete post with its number and its altitude, and a good many are still surfaced in their original setts, which at 1,611 metres in the wet are exactly as reassuring as cobbles sound. Over the top there are twenty-six more going down the other side into the Soča valley.

The road is called Ruska cesta on the northern approach — the Russian Road. It was cut in 1915 by prisoners of war captured on the Eastern Front and marched here, and it exists because Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915 and the Austro-Hungarian army discovered within days that it could not get shells into the upper Soča valley fast enough.

The road the front needed

The Isonzo front ran for two and a half years along the river the Slovenes call the Soča, and it was fought over twelve separate times between June 1915 and November 1917. It was mountain war of the worst kind: trenches blasted into limestone, positions above 2,000 metres held through winter, and a casualty figure for the whole front that runs well into the hundreds of thousands on each side.

Supplying it from the north was the problem. The existing ways into the valley were the Predel pass, exposed and long, and the Bohinj railway, a single line through a six-kilometre tunnel that could be cut. A direct road from Kranjska Gora over Vršič to Trenta shortened the run to the Bovec sector to a morning. Austria-Hungary had the survey; what it did not have was labour, because every man who could dig was already at a front. So it used prisoners. Camps went up at both ends of the climb, the first cut was made in March 1915, and a military road passable by motor transport was open over a high alpine pass by the end of that year. Widening and snow-clearing ran on through the winter, which is why there were still men on the mountain the following March.

The pass is Slovenia's best drive and it was built by men who were not asked. Both facts sit on the same fifty bends, and the country has chosen not to sand either one off.

8 March 1916

On the morning of 8 March 1916 an avalanche came off the slope above the northern camp and buried it. The number killed is usually given as around a hundred and ten; some accounts put it at several hundred. Nobody was keeping a list worth the name, and that uncertainty is part of the record rather than a gap in it — these were prisoners, in a war economy, at the end of a supply chain that counted shells more carefully than it counted men.

The survivors built a chapel on the site. It is small, wooden, Orthodox in plan, with two onion domes and a pyramid of stones behind it, and it sits just above the eighth bend on the way up. There is no interpretation centre, no ticket and no car park to speak of — a lay-by, a short path, and a building that has been repaired rather than restored for over a century.

What the chapel became

It survived two Yugoslavias and a border change without being turned into anything. After Slovenian independence the annual commemoration at the chapel resumed as a formal event each July, attended by Slovenian and Russian officials, and in 2006, on the chapel's ninetieth anniversary, the climb below it was officially renamed Ruska cesta. For a small country with no historical quarrel with Moscow and a long habit of being useful to larger neighbours, an unpolitical war grave in the mountains turned out to be a diplomatic asset.

The centenary made that explicit. On 30 July 2016 Vladimir Putin came to Vršič for the hundredth anniversary of the chapel, and the same day unveiled a monument at Ljubljana's Žale cemetery to the Russian and Soviet soldiers who died on Slovenian soil in both world wars. Russia was two years into EU sanctions over Crimea at the time and Slovenia is in both the EU and NATO, which made a presidential visit to a wooden chapel one of the more closely read pieces of choreography in European diplomacy that summer. The ceremony still happens every July. Its weight has changed considerably since 2022, and the chapel has not.

Driving it

The pass is shut in winter — in most years from the first heavy snow around late October or November until April or May, and the closure is absolute rather than advisory. The public bus from Bovec to Kranjska Gora runs summer only, roughly late June to late September, and it is the single best-value hour and a half of public transport in the country. Cyclists have the road from first light and deserve the space; the cobbled bends are slippery in rain and the descent is where people get it wrong. Stop at the chapel on the way up rather than promising yourself you will catch it coming down, because you will be watching the road.