Vault lights are glass prisms set into sidewalks to let light into basements below. I first came across a vault light in Lviv, but I didn’t know what it was until I saw them in Edinburgh and Tallinn and started researching what they were. Hayward Brothers In Edinburgh, I found a […]

n Riga I found a manhole cover dating from 1901. Upon researching it later, I realized it was made by the Swedish company called Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag. Sweden’s first telecom operating company (founded in 1883), Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolaget (Stockholm General Telephone Company) (SAT) installed and operated telephone equipment. The company had […]

An old iron gate in Tallinn. The inscription says “W. Paech in Reval 1868.” Reval was the old name for Tallinn, in use from the 13th century until 1917.  Estonia was part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century; however, Baltic Germans made up the majority of the city’s […]

This ghost sign I saw through the window of my hostel room. It is on an former furniture factory in a courtyard. The sign says “Mööblitööstus,” which is Estonian for “furniture manufacture.” Two restored hand-painted signs from when this building used to house a pharmacy and a gallery. Now it […]

Ģipša Fabrika (Gypsym Factory) is located on the island of Kipsala, a former fishermen’s village. This nineteenth-century brick building used to be a plaster factory. Now it is part of a luxury apartment complex. Somewhere in the Old Town These two signs are on a building on Albert Street, a street […]

One of the highlights of my trip to Tallinn was my unexpected tour of the Ukrainian church and Ukrainian Cultural Center. The cultural center is located in a beautiful 14th century building located within the medieval walls of Tallinn’s Old Town. The center includes a museum, which was created “to help […]

Although not nearly to the same extent as in Tallinn, remnants of the merchants’ hoisting mechanisms remain on several of the medieval houses in Riga. A granary from the 18th century

Tallinn’s Old Town used to be an important trading city on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Fortunately, a majority of the medieval buildings have survived, including many of the merchants’ houses. The attic spaces—and sometimes several of the upper floors—of these houses were used to store the merchants’ goods. […]

Lehedzyne I spent a weekend visiting a friend in Lehedzyne, a village near Uman. I found two interesting boot scrapers. One extra wide one (for several people to scrape at the same time) near the village store, and then another large one with a handle attached to it in Baba […]

Modern hand-painted signs in Ivano-Frankivsk: