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 Embodied in outdated signage, beautiful antique craftsman, and remnants of outdated infrastructures, these mementos of a bygone world serve as are our physical connections to the past.
Antique sinks still in their original locations seem come to hard by, be it in Lviv, Prague, Vienna, or other Habsburg cities that I’ve visited. But in Vienna I did find a couple. On the other hand, I’ve come across quite a few water pumps in these cities. Here is […]
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In Vienna, at almost every step there is an old manhole cover or storm drain. Fortunately, most include a date along with the manufacturer’s mark, and this is true even for modern ones. Below are square storm drains ranging from 1896 to 1957, posted in chronological order.
A couple of years ago my friend and I had the idea of documenting Ukraine’s Soviet-era bus stops, which remain in many villages across the country. The majority are decorated with mosaics and many have a distinct Soviet style of Socialist realism or Soviet pop art, but others styles include Cubo-Futurism, […]
Vienna has a lot of guard stones, as do probably all old European cities and towns. Most that I found were made of stone, but I also found some metal ones. In the medieval center stone is more common, while metal barriers are common for newer buildings. Looks as though […]
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 […]
Berehovo, or “Ukrainian Hungary,” is a town in Zakarpattia, located only 5 km from the Hungarian border. For most of its history it was part of Hungary, and so this heritage is still strongly visible in the cityscape (all street signs, many shop signs, etc., are in both Hungarian and […]
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 […]
Traces of Mukachevo’s Czechoslovakian past can still be found in the city. (During the interwar period, Mukachevo along with the rest of Zakarpattia (Transcarpathia) was part of Czechoslovakia.) “In 1883, Antonín Kunz (1859–1910) founded a company in Hranice [Czech Republic] for the repair and production of small farm machinery and then specialized […]
