Our cities’ and buildings’ physical spaces, urban and rural landscapes, hold secrets to how people used to live, hold traces of previous eras. Embodied in outdated signage, beautiful antique craftsman, and remnants of outdated infrastructures, these mementos of a bygone world serve as are our physical connections to the past.
Buildings in Prague have two numbers: a descriptive number (číslo popisné) and a reference number (číslo orientační). The descriptive number is unique within one cadastral area. Today these numbers can be found on red plaques, but the original numbers were either painted or engraved onto the buildings or etched onto […]
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In Prague I come across one antique sink, which was still in it’s original location, though it is no longer used for its original function. Now instead of water, the sink holds a candle. The sink is located in a tiny courtyard of an old building, which today houses a […]
Most of the antique roller shutters that I found were made by the company DUKO, which also made shutters for Mukachevo, thus they likely date from the interwar period. Antique shutters made by other companies. I’ve seen the same lion symbol on shutters in Vienna, Berehovo, and Lviv.
“Vodovod” means “water supply” in Czech
These bilingual German and Czech street signs (some include descriptive house numbers) date from before WWI, likely before 1892 when the Czech-controlled City Hall decided to replace the city’s bilingual street signs with exclusively Czech ones.
Before Empress Maria Theresa introduced identifying numbers to Prague in 1770, houses were known and located by allegorical symbols. Many of them originally had alchemical significance. The Two Suns The Golden Key Castle goldsmiths lived in this house in the 17th century They paid fees to the city and thus […]
Throughout the centuries many disastrous floods struck Prague. In particular, one such flood struck September 2-5, 1890. I came across a few memorial plaques which mark the level reached by the floodwaters. Výška vody 4. září 1890 Water level 4 September 1890
I found a couple descriptive building number plaques that date from the interwar period when Uzhhorod was part of Czechoslovakia. The signs were written in three languages: Rusyn (Ukrainian), Czech, and Hungarian. Descriptive numbers would have been unique within the municipal part (a village, a quarter, mostly for one cadastral […]
A sampling of Uzhhorod’s prewar manhole covers. Read more about Uzhhorod’s remnants of the past here and here.
I recently visited Uzhhorod to see the blooming sakuras. Along with the beautiful sakuras I came across quite a few remnants of Uzhhorod’s prewar past. I have a previous post about ghost signs in Uzhhorod, so to repeat what I wrote before, Uzhhorod (Ungvár / Užhorod / Ungwar), a city in Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia Oblast of Ukraine), which […]
