Shadows of a Forgotten World

Photos taken from the Facebook page Ретро Львов

I spent this weekend 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 Katya's courtyard. I suspect there are still many of them in the village.

An album of authentic Ukrainian folk songs from the central region of Ukraine : Forgotten Songs of Ukrainians (“ Й а вже років двісті, як козак в неволі ” Забуті пісні украінців) . “This music is vanishing away. Unique authentic music recordings made at the end of the last century during folklore research expeditions on both banks of Dneper River in Kiev District of Ukraine…Many of these songs are forgotten and vanishing.” You can preview some songs through this webpage .

In Chicago when I was looking through a record store’s folk collection, the title of this album caught my eye: Voices of Forgotten Worlds. It’s a collection of authentic music of indigenous people around the world. You can listen to samples of the songs here .

A few weeks ago my friend and I found this unusual boot scraper –  it took me a few seconds to figure out what it was. It's located inside a carriage entrance of a building in the center of Lviv.

Chernivtsi has quite a few boot scrapers. This last one is located right in front of a guard stone.

An antique glazed wall tile in Krakow with the manufacturer's mark.

Instead of placing a tile on the floor with a company’s name, sometimes a special tile would be installed on the wall. The same companies that made floor tiles also made the wall tiles. These tiles are typically glazed. There are only a handful of these in Lviv.