Postcards with featured images of Druskininkai
The Museum collects and stores only strictly iconographic images which impicture Druskininkai city sceneries and other old-time places of interest. All cards featuring images of Druskininkai offer an opportunity for perceiving the City in the context of the discrete historical period, as well as by eyes of the self-contained publisher, photographer or by means of the certain catalogue, typographic style and execution technique of the artist.
This collection includes several historical key periods: the Czarist epoch followed by the reference period of the First World War, the Interwar time and the great apocalypse of the Second World War, in addition to the Soviet period and present day pictures.
The card collection originating in the Czarist and Interwar times have truly formed a large part of the existing assemblage (a total of 691 cards). Leonas Baranovskis’s cards have been also ascribed to the present collection. The Museum preserves Druskininkai community’s proud heritage – 4 souvenir books consisting of ten to seventeen cards being extracted in a random way.
Leading Druskininkai publishers and photographers
Unfortunately, we do not yet have much information on publishers of the disputed area. It must have happened due to the fact that this archive related material had been stored in the Grodno (Hrodna) chanceries. And therefore, it cannot be attained easily. However, abundance of the existent publishers, as well as of their published output, clearly refer to and confirm popularity of the following idea.
With time passing, cards sale turned into the marketable sale, and therefore, publishing business could not then have been detrimental to one’s life and wealth. In those days not only did Druskininkai shops trade cards, but private libraries and different souvenir and gift traders too. Several archive documents, such as popular citizen requests to establish a number of stationary stores, as well as abundance of the above-mentioned cards proclaim the existence of businesses practising the trade.
