Death at 108 of Slovenian writer and intellectual Boris Pahor

Writer and intellectual Boris Pahor, belonging to the Slovenian minority, died on Monday May 30 at the age of 108 in Trieste, a city on the border between Italy and Slovenia, the media announced.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella spoke in a message of condolences of a “witness and victim of the horrors of wars, exacerbated nationalisms and totalitarian ideologies”. In July 2020, Boris Pahor was promoted by Sergio Mattarella to the Grand Cross of Merit of the Italian Republic. He also had the French Legion of Honor.

To read alsoBoris Pahor, dean of world letters and great witness of a defunct Europe

Born in Trieste on August 26, 1913, Boris Pahor was a resistance fighter during the war, in 1943, then deported at the beginning of 1944 to the concentration camp of Struthof, in Alsace, then to Dora, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

His best-known book, Pèlerin chez les ombres (1990 for the French edition at La Table Ronde), is the dramatic account of his deportation, a testimony comparable to that of the Italian Primo Levi. He is also the author of Difficult Spring and When Odysseus Returns to Trieste, which highlight the difficulties of the Slovenian minority in Trieste.