Leopold Voje
Legacies of mariners
Leopold Voje (Ljubljana 1894–Ljubljana 1975) was on the last voyage of the Austro-Hungarian torpedo boat Kaiserin Elisabeth to East Asia. In 1912, he was recruited into the navy, where he completed a course for junior torpedo officers, and sailed to East Asia in the following year. His ship initially cruised between Chinese, Japanese and Korean ports, but in 1914, it joined German forces in Qingdao, China, in the German-Japanese War. After the German defeat, most of the Austro-Hungarian and German soldiers were taken prisoner to Japan, where they were interned in several camps. Leopold Voje was in the Narashino camp. During this time, in 1916, he was somehow able to have a commemorative silk embroidery made as a memento of his journey. He returned from Japan with other POWs of Yugoslav nationality in 1920. He later sold the embroidery to the Maritime Museum Piran.
