Old postcards Edge Carpathian

The Carpathian Region set (in Russian, «Край прикарпатский») was issued in 1973, and even its printed cover survives in this section. It is less a mountain album than a portrait of the Ivano-Frankivsk region in the early 1970s: the regional capital, district towns and resort villages along the Prut valley. These Soviet postcards of the Carpathian foothills focus on what was new at the time — a railway station, hotels, restaurants, a cinema, a department store.

Ivano-Frankivsk appears with its railway station, Adam Mickiewicz Square, the main post office and the Kosmos cinema. Kalush is shown through Bohdan Khmelnytsky Avenue and a hotel, Nadvirna through the Berkut restaurant and hotel, Kolomyia through its department store. All of these cards are dated 1973.

The second half of the set climbs into the mountains. Yaremche, a Prut valley resort that began to grow in 1894, is represented by the Hutsulshchyna turbaza (a Soviet tourist hostel) and restaurant and by a bridge over the waterfall. There is the Mountain Air sanatorium (a Soviet health resort) in Vorokhta, in the upper Prut, and the Dovbush Rocks near Bolekhiv: sandstone outcrops up to 80 metres high, named after Oleksa Dovbush, leader of the opryshky outlaws.

Researchers of Soviet resort architecture in the Carpathians get a single-year snapshot here, with towns and mountain stops gathered into one series.