What he found was a natural cave in the ice and material scattered on the surface - steel helmets, straw shells, boxes of ammunition - and he realized that there must be some kind of structure underneath. Together with friends from the village of Peio, all war enthusiasts, he began to investigate the site further. Two summers later, Franco Nicolis from the archaeological heritage office in the provincial capital of Trento, also joined the project and together they have excavated a wooden hut that turns out to be a station on one of the cable cars that brought vital supplies to the troops.
The hut is built against the rocky peak of Punta Linke, and behind it is a 30-meter tunnel through the peak. When the excavation team first found the tunnel, which is at man height, it was filled with ice which they removed using giant fans.
During the war, huge wooden crates were brought up by cable car and pushed through the tunnel before embarking on the final leg of their journey - an impressive 1200 meter leap - using an unsecured cable car across the glacier and to the front line. On one side of the tunnel is a window where the crates were monitored on their journey to the front.
Inside the cabin is a Ling engine, made in Munich. It was then dismantled by the departing Austrians, but has now been restored.
Russian tourists visiting Peio today may not know that other Russians were there before them, prisoners from the Eastern Front who were used as pack mules or put to work weaving straw caloshes that protected Austrian feet from frostbite.
The war museum down in Peio has display cases with primitive surgical instruments of the type Kristof may have used as well as rosaries, porcelain tubes resembling small saxophones decorated in Tyrolean style and «trench art» carved from fragments of grenades.
In the time after the armistice when the villagers of Peio were starving, they roamed the mountains looking for things they could reuse or sell. What they kept as souvenirs, they later donated to the museum when it opened 10 years ago. Now they consider the museum their collective property and are proud of it.
In the summer of 2013, just before the snow arrived, Nicoli's team put the finishing touches to the restoration of the cable car station. From summer 2014, mountain hikers will be able to visit this simple monument up in the heights.
Nicolis says he sometimes looks through the window at Punta Linke and tries to see the mountains as the soldiers did. Those who came from distant corners of the Austrian Empire may not have understood the point of fighting for this inhospitable desert.
Read also Slekt1's article: Melting glaciers in northern Italy reveal remains of soldiers from World War I
Source:The Thelegraph
