The Lost Art of Writing Postcards
A few notes on how 'communication' has changed over the years
As I mentioned, I’m a wee bit short on time this week, hence more postcards.
Today, as it’s the weekend, a few specimen from WW1-era Albania, of all places. As I told you in my first Australia-themed posting, I found some postcards from Albania—a country that was created in 1913 due to great power intervention, much like its newest neighbour, Kosovo—and here we go.
These postcards were sent by members of the Austro-Hungarian army. During the Great War, Vienna’s troops occupied parts of Albania, which was known as both ‘exotic’, very much ‘Oriental’, and, of course, ‘backwards’ in the extreme. Maria Todorova’s wonderful Imagining the Balkans tells the story of the ‘Western’ co-creation of this particular region.
All the below postcards were written by servicemen, and they show how little economically developed the area was, yet this didn’t prevent intervention by the Central Powers—because they could.
Enjoy, if you will.
Another lost art-handwriting. Look at the beautiful script!
I'm having trouble with my childish sense of humour reading "K.u.k". I know (from reading Svejk among other things) it's "kaiserliche und königsliche".
But "kuk" in swedish is one of our most common swear-words.
Anyways, that bit about rural is a thing often overlooked when people compare economical-political systems: the starting point.