Time.news – The Slovenian-speaking writer and intellectual from Trieste, Boris Pahor, has died. He was 108 years old. The news was reported by the Slovenian newspaper Primorsky Dnevnik. Born in Trieste in 1913, Pahor was considered the most important Slovenian writer with Italian citizenship and one of the deepest and most significant voices of the tragedy of deportation to the Nazi concentration camps, told in the ‘Necropolis’, but also of the discrimination against the Slovenian minority in Trieste during the fascist regime.
The intellectual, a first-hand witness to the tragedies of the twentieth century, has written about thirty books translated into dozens of languages. Some of the best known and most important: ‘Here it is forbidden to speak’, ‘The stake in the port’, ‘The villa on the lake’, ‘The city in the gulf’.
It disappears #BorisPahor but his poetic and prophetic words on the horrors of the world will not disappear #Novecento against the #minorities. A duty to repeat them and pass them on to future generations. pic.twitter.com/pxfIMiyS9n
– Enrico Letta (@EnricoLetta) May 30, 2022
On 13 July 2020, the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella awarded Boris Pahor the honor of Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Pahor was among the last living witnesses of the fascist fire of the Narodni Dom which took place in Trieste on 13 July 1920 and represented a real lighthouse within the Slovenian community from the Karst to the Tarvisio area, passing through Gorizia and the Benecija of the Natisone valleys.
Catholic, during the Fascist regime he suffered the denationalization of his people at the hands of Benito Mussolini. At the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the resistance and in 1944 he was captured by the Nazis and deported to concentration camps in Germany.
Precisely the terrible experience lived in the fields of Natzweiler, Markirch, Dachau, Nordhausen, Harzungen and Bergen-Belsen, in 1967 led Pahor to write ‘Necropolis’, the book with which he became famous in Italy only in old age. Translated into many languages, in fact, his masterpiece arrives late in Italy, just in 1997, thirty years after its first original edition.
During his life Pahor was decorated with the French Legion d’honneur and the knighthood of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, as well as the highest honor of the Republic of Slovenia.