What lies hidden in a chest of memories? Old photographs, stories, dialect words, fragments of everyday life and the stories of people that, if left unwritten, might slowly fade into oblivion.

You are warmly invited to the presentation of the book Štorje sz škrinje by Mirella Baruca, a Koper native born in Trieste, who seeks out and records stories of people, places and memories.

The book presentation will take place on Tuesday, 20 October 2026 at 7:00 p.m. at the Izola Cultural Centre.

At the heart of the book is her grandmother Vanca, through whose memories Koper and Slovenian Istria in the second half of the 20th century come to life once again. The author collected the stories from personal memories, conversations with people, old photographs and local history materials, and recorded them in a language imbued with the spirit of home.

As Assoc. Prof. Dr Neža Čebron Lipovec wrote about the book, Mirella offers us, from the “dusty chest of collective memory”, an album of images that weave together a rich network of shared memories. Prof. Dr Sandra Bašić Hrvatin, meanwhile, places grandmother Vanca at the heart of the story – the narrator of her own life, through whom we walk the streets of a town that no longer exists as it once did.

“If we do not write a story down, it may disappear. If we preserve it, it remains a part of us and, as our heritage, a part of the generations to come.”
— Mirella Baruca