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 Embodied in outdated signage, beautiful antique craftsman, and remnants of outdated infrastructures, these mementos of a bygone world serve as are our physical connections to the past.
It’s very sad to see ghost signs defaced. Graffiti is just one of the many threats to these old signs. Recently I noticed that an interesting Polish-language sign in Lviv had been vandalized. Then shortly later, the West Ham tag was painted over with pink paint to better reveal the letters […]
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In Krakow I found an old metal roller shutter made by a company from Lviv—Bielicki (several shutters by this company still remain in Lviv). In this instance, however, it seems as though the company was partnered with a company called Wietzen. And actually I recently found the same exact plate […]
Chernivtsi has quite a few Austrian- and Romanian-era metal roller shutters. Like in Lviv, some inscriptions include the company’s address (i.e., J. Engel Cernauţi Strada Wilson 7, which is Romanian for J. Engel Chernivtsi 7 Wilson Street). Lviv has this same Prague-made shutter
Due to historical reasons, there are very few Ukrainian-language ghost signs in Ukraine, but in the Ukrainian Village (a neighborhood on the north side of the city) in Chicago, there is one in Ukrainian, and it is possible that there had been more. The one that I found is for […]
Chernivtsi / Cernăuți / Czernowitz, located in south-western Ukraine near Romania, was a multicultural city that at various times had large populations of Romanians, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Russians, and Roma. Chernivtsi was the capital of the Bukovina region of the Austrian Empire. In 1918, it was annexed by the […]
Uzhhorod (Ungvár / Užhorod / Ungwar), a city in Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia Oblast of Ukraine), which is near the borders of Slovakia and Hungary, has a multicultural history. For a long time the region around Uzhhorod was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, later the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After WWI, it was […]
Sanok is a Polish city located in the Carpathian Mountains. Historically, the region was inhabited by Lemkos and Boykos. In the interwar period, the city was known as a center of the Ukrainian movement in Galicia, and of the cultural heritage of Lemkos and other Rusyns. I didn’t spend much […]
On Saturday I wanted to visit one of my favorite ghost signs, to see how much was left as it has been crumbling. Instead of being sad about how it is slowing disappearing, I was pleasantly surprised to find a man uncovering an epic ghost sign in the same passageway! […]
I have good luck when it comes to finding ghost signs right when they have been uncovered and right before they will be covered again. Today I went on a bike ride to a part of Lviv I go to only every couple of months, and found that some ghost […]
