Travel around Central Europe

Croatian hit in declining PRL, or what Shakespeare has for the Balkans

The exhibition by Boris Bućan, presented in the historic cellars of the ICC, featured a poster for the performance of Ivo Brešan A ceremonial banquet at a funeral home , staged in 1982 on the stage of the Croatian National Theater in Split.

A jewel in a cemetery

One of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Hungary is located at Kozma Street in the Kőbánya District of Pest, i.e. on the left bank of Budapest. It was founded in 1891 by the Jewish neological community (Hungarian current of Judaism) right next to the New Public Cemetery. Members of the numerous Budapest Jewish elite rest here - dignitaries of religious life, bankers and business teams, personalities of the world of science, culture and art. Today, this place attracts enthusiasts of Hungarian architecture and art at the turn of the century.

New Houses in the province

New Homes is the name of a housing estate founded in 1931 in the suburbs of Stanisławów - a city that served as the administrative capital of the capital of the southeastern voivodship of the Second Polish Republic, and now a West Ukrainian city, called Ivano-Frankivsk. The name of the  New Homes  housing estate from the early 1930s referred to the German term  Neues Bauen . In Germany, this concept meant the use of comprehensive modernization, whose guiding idea was to build modern housing estates, develop the idea of ​​a minimum apartment and modern interior design. Bauhaus workshops were the "forge" of new homes before the First World War.

Guard in the Arsenal

There are sixteen of them. They stand at attention, grouped on a small square by the marina between two watchtowers. When fog envelops over the River Thames, they look alive from afar. These are sculptures of Peter Burke - cast in 188 cm male figures - titled  Assembly .

Island spa

For long weeks of quarantine, we dream to go on a trip, escape for a while outside the city. That is why today we offer a visit to a special place, associated with health and vitality for years. We will visit a city where various threads of Central European stories are intertwined.

Where did Piłsudski escape? Few words about the hospital St. Nicholas the Wonderworker

"We went ahead for men's troops. Patients with a mild disposition enjoyed great freedom, discreet caretakers watched over them. The patients were segregated to a certain extent according to social strata, also according to their level of wealth. The rooms were clean, decently furnished, the lack of social cohesion struck among the wandering men. They seemed distrustful and suspicious of each other, everyone lived only their own excited life.

Borderland city - fortress or bridge?

One of the phenomena of Central Europe is border culture. The location on the border of two or several countries determined the existence of cities as strongholds defending against the attack of enemies or enabled rapid development due to intense trade exchange. The place that shows this phenomenon in a special way is the small town of Kőszeg located just off the border between Hungary and Austria. In this charming, picturesque place we can see the complexity of the cultural landscape of the region.

Ladder to heaven

A steep ladder climbs step by step clad bearded monks in long robes. Above their heads in the open skies are angelic choirs, and at the bottom are horned devils chasing from the ladder to the hellish abyss of those who hesitated and lost their balance on the road to heaven.

The most famous villa in Moravia

Until the outbreak of World War I, Brno was a distant "suburb" of Vienna and an area of textile production in Austria-Hungary. The rise of independent Czechoslovakia changed this state of affairs forever. The capital of Austria found itself in the territory of another state, and the young federation decided to transform the city into a modern center of the armed industry. As early as 1919, suburban villages were joined to Brno, the city area increased threefold, and the population exceeded 200,000.

How to live in a Czech fairy tale

Is life still possible in cities on the UNESCO World Heritage List? This is the question asked in 2018 by the Czech artist Kateřina Šedá. The stimulus for discussion was the case of Český Krumlov, a fabulously beautiful town in southwestern Bohemia, which had been developing since the 13th century in the meanders of the Vltava River, in the shadow of a castle situated on a high rock.

Skopje - a disturbed city

Located in the belt of the Balkan Peninsula, restless, experienced by the past, looking with hope for the future - Skopje, the capital of Northern Macedonia, a city permanently connected with art with the world. Taken out of sleep, in the summer of 1963 was greeted by an earthquake measuring almost 6.1 on the Richter scale. 75 percent of the city was under the rubble, and the clock on the former building of the Main Post Office and train station will always show the time of 5.17, constantly reminding of the former cataclysm.

Age of the epidemic – Polish scholars at the St. Petersburg Institute of Experimental Medicine

"- Here," a polite guide explains, "we grow  plague , here we have  diphtheria  again, and here  cholera . Maybe we can go to the  plague ? ...  - And yes! Plague in hermetically sealed jars, like in a prison, does not have to be dangerous. Staying among the "enemies of humanity" would be pleasant, if not for the shortness of breath from the tropical heat that forces us to grab the door handle. [...]

Ottoman fez and Central Europe

"The outfit is complemented by a red fez on the head, which is never taken off in public and before anyone. Only at home, because of the heat, the Turk sometimes has his head uncovered, but let a stranger come in, soon he enters the fez, so as not to violate the requirements of the convention, and maybe also of religion. Many of ours wear a fez and do not take it off, as is customary, even in a church, "wrote the Polish emigrant Władysław Dunin, who lived in the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s (Romania (Bosporus, Balkan and Danube). 1855-1878. Sketch - social against the background of memories wrote Władysław Dunin, Lviv 1887, pp. 102-103).

Oases of glass, light and air

Sport and health, recreation and leisure are popular slogans of the interwar period expressing optimism and faith in building a new tomorrow. Architecture became a type of spatial response to widely expressed postulates and a tool of change.

Green gazebo on the Danube

At the turn of the century, Budapest became an important industrial center. In the eleventh volume of Britanniki, the city was described as "one of the most natural capitals" of the continent, which slowly began to perform the functions of both the national capital and the cosmopolitan metropolis with almost six hundred cafes and twenty-two daily newspaper titles!

Dialogue of music and painting

Can music and painting have something in common? Can musical values ​​be expressed through artistic means? An attempt to combine these two elements was made by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, one of the most important Lithuanian artists of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Calm countryside, ... modernist village!

The interwar period was associated with the worship of the city. Skyscrapers, cars, factories and rushing modernity rising up - this picture emerges most often. The development of the village at this time is rare. However, modernization did not bypass the countryside. An interesting example is the small village of Lisków near Kalisz. In the theater of the successes of the Second Polish Republic, it had the spectacular role of a model modernist village.

A cultural glacier in the city

When I first arrived in Oslo a few years ago, it was just after five in the morning. I got off at the Oslo Sentralstasjon station with a firm determination that first - despite the very early hour - I must see the National Opera and Ballet building, which I have heard and read so much about. Awarded in 2009 with the prestigious Mies van der Rohe award, it quickly made Snøhett's architectural studio and Norwegian architecture famous.

Imagined Kosice

On the inter-war map of the Czechoslovak Republic, Košice occupy a special place. Located in the Slovak part of the newly created state, a bit off the beaten track and away from the hustle and bustle of metropolitan Prague, the city became the birthplace of the phenomenon known as the Košice moderna. The Kosice of the 1920s and the early 1930s was a kind of informal artistic "colony" bringing together Slovak, Czech and Hungarian artists. Those who were permanently connected with the city, and those who spent several years or even months there.

Mysterious dark-haired in a painted sneakers

He draws almost without a break, day and often at night - on everything he can. Tara von Neudorf has extraordinary talent. He discovered it by accident in military service, when extremely bored, he painted Fujiyama for his commander.

Zsolnay - the most famous Hungarian colors

Located in the south of Hungary, Pécs is a place with which the history of Zsolnay, one of the most famous Central European ceramic factories, is inseparably connected. This family factory, famous for the production of decorative vessels, but also architectural details, adorning the numerous buildings to this day in even Budapest, is one of the most important symbols of Hungarian Art Nouveau and Belle époque.

Clock of new times

At every full hour, Death gives the first sign. With one skeleton, he pulls the signature ring, the other lifts the hourglass. Time passes! - shows Grim Reaper. Then the Turk, the symbol of debauchery, starts to shake his head, Vanity looks in the mirror, Greed shakes the purse with money. Finally, the apostles are set in motion ... Who never stopped in front of the Prague City Hall to watch the orloy performance.

Mother-in-law of Polish prophet and raging damn

The most dangerous epidemic of cholera hit Europe in 1831-1838. It arrived to Polish lands during the November Uprising of 1830/1831 due to the decimated disease of the Russian army (the doctors at the time considered it essentially an epidemic, but not contagious) disease. In June 1831, among others near Vitebsk - the commander-in-chief of the Polish forces fleeing from the insurgents and the military governor of the Kingdom of Poland, Grand Duke Konstanty Pawłowicz, and in Kleszew near Pułtusk - the imperial marshal Ivan I. Dybicz suppressing the uprising.

About a vaccine from Lviv

The building at Zielona Street in Lviv, builded just before the outbreak of World War II according to the design of Jan Bagieński, became the seat of the Social Insurance Institution and medical institutions. Today there is a Lviv sanepid and the Faculty of Microbiology at the Medical University.

Dalmatian Michelangelo

There are two Dalmatias: continental and coastal one. Coastal cities were shaped by Mediterranean culture, the continental part by rural, pastoral Dinar culture. Ivan Meštrović (1883–1962), the greatest Croatian artist of the 20th century - he came from the latter. From a hajduk country - relatives of robbers whose legend is remembered as untamed in the fight against the Turks. The coast is the homeland of Emperor Diocletian with the cities of Šibenik, Trogir, Split, which dazzled a teenage sculptor.