Paper short abstract:

In diaries, memoirs, connected with the First World War, the question arises how and to what extent internalized ordinary worship routines were one of the important segments of ensuring normality as a survival strategy employed by both soldiers and civilians on the Isonzo front and the hinterland.

Paper long abstract:

When one looks at the event that happened (or is believed to have happened) in the first year of the First World War, depicted in the Christmas Eve movie Joyeux Noël (2005), when the soldiers on both sides were said to have taken off a night and day against the will of their superiors, interrupting the shooting and killing of the opposite side, one can wonder how deeply the soldiers internalized position in which the mere singing of Christmas songs had a synesthetic effect because it transformed the extreme situation into an annual normality and the expectation of the man at home, who sets up a crib and tree. It is a question of how the established worship routine, internalized in childhood, creates a special feeling that makes possible a different experience of Christmas even in the war and how it transcends hostilities. The need for the ordinary practice of worship routines is also testified to by three churches built by the soldiers themselves on the Isonzo front in 1916: the church in Javorca, the mosque in Log pod Mangartom, and the Russian chapel below the Vršič Pass. At the same time, it is a study of how these ordinary worship practices were used to deal with the deaths of comrades at the front or relatives at home.

Following these ordinary worship routines, usually only briefly recorded, this study discusses the diaries of Slovenian, German, and Italian soldiers and civilians in the Isonzo front and its hinterland.