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.

Caption: ‘troop encampment and horse grounds in the Albanian theatre of war’

As the reverse shows, while the postcard originally came from Vienna (bottom right corner), it was posted in Shkodra, Albania, on 2 June 1918. The purple stamp indicated ‘field post office Shkodra’.

Durazzo, or Durres, is an ancient coastal town founded by Greek colonists centuries BC, and in the 1910s, it looked like this.

‘A Group of Montenegrins’, indicating transhumance (semi-nomadic) herding clans quite ignoring the borders—and the war—resting in the shade of a tree with their livestock.

You can see the date (13 Jan. 1917), and note the type-written backside: one Karl Meisl who instructs his brother Ferdinand to ‘buy these postcards…and I’ll mail them [back] to you’.

The bazaar in Shkodra, also written by Karl Meisl to his brother Ferdinand, dated 21 June 1916. Note that the former used a pencil and added more than a few lines to his ‘best wishes’ (cf. with the first backside above).

Enjoy, if you will.