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 […]
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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 […]
A documentary film was recently released about the dying tradition of shepherding in the Carpathian Mountains. The film, called The Living Fire (Жива Ватра), was directed by my acquaintance Ostap Kostyuk. “ЖИВА ВАТРА” (The Living Fire) Ukraine, 2014, 77’ “A four-year-long project documenting three generations of Ukrainian Carpathian shepherds in […]
Last month, Smithsonian Folkways released an album of ancient songs from the Chornobyl region, songs all but forgotten due to the nuclear disaster that wiped out the nearby villages. Fortunately, some of these songs have been preserved thanks to ethnomusicologist Yevhen Yefremov and Ensemble Hilka: “Under the musical direction of Yevhen Yefremov, an ethnomusicologist […]
In the diaspora I grew up singing certain Ukrainian folk songs, which I thought every Ukrainian in Ukraine knew, so I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t true. I grew up in a community made mostly of descendants of Galician immigrants and was a member of the scouting […]
Two types of forgotten methods of urban sanitation:
