A sampling of vault windows in Vienna: In Klosterneuburg

As I suspected, few doors were open or unlocked to Vienna’s residential buildings. Unlike Lviv, the vast majority of doors are in good condition and kept locked, usually with a key and not code. Therefore, I didn’t have the opportunity to see many entranceways. However, I lucked out and did […]

Vienna is chock-full of antique (late 19th and early 20th century) metal roller shutters. The most interesting to find were the shutters made by manufacturers who also made shutters for others cities in the Austrian Empire, in particular for Lviv and Rzeszów. Joh. Schuberth Wien Shutters by this company can be found […]

Before electricity, stairwells were lit up by candles, gas lamps, and other types of lighting. Lanterns were hung from hooks or poles high in the central area of the stairwell, or sometimes the stairwell’s newel posts, due to their prime location, functioned also as lamp posts. Early newel posts burned […]

Berehovo is in Zakarpattia, only 5 km from the Hungarian border. In the interwar period, the city was part of Czechoslovakia. Old wooden shutters, similar to ones found in Mukachevo, another city in Zakarpattia. A Czechoslovakian-made roller shutter První moravská továrna na rolety ANT. BILEK (Antonin Bilek’s first Moravian company […]

In Mukachevo I found several examples of antique wooden shutters and quite a few with the manufacturer’s mark. They date from before WWII. Made by Slovakian-based company: Szabó, Csonka a spol. és Társa Lučenec. Made by Vienna-based company: Woltär & Molnár. Wien. VI. LINKE WIENZEILE 40. I found an ad […]

In Mukachevo I found a few antique metal shutters made by the company DUKO, which was based in Prague-Vinohrady. As they are Czech made, they likely date from the interwar period. Another grouping of DUKO shutters I also found a roller shutter made by the Budapest-based copmany Paschka. There still […]

Two types of forgotten methods of urban sanitation:

Volodymyr Koziuk started documenting thatched-roof houses 30 years ago. First he started painting them, then taking photos of them. “When I was searching for these houses, everyone laughed at me: ‘What a fool, spending time on old houses,’” says artist and philanthropist Volodymyr Koziuk. Volodymyr doesn’t regret all the time […]

Giovanni Zuliani (1843-1909) moved from Italy to Lviv and in 1892 founded a company specializing in mosaic and granite terrazzo prepared in Venetian style, marble ornamentation of walls and furniture, and all kinds of cement work. The company had branches in three other Galician cities: Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk), Chernivtsi, and Krakow. […]