He lived and worked the width of Asia away from these unfortunates
locked in their zindan, a hole in the ground with a door and a adobe roof over it, described as a "traditional Central Asian prison" in the Library of Congress website devoted to the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who roamed pre-Revolutionary Russia in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.
And none of them were aware of these people, a family-mining operation in the Urals.Fascinating, lovely images more than a hundred years old, of a place and a time as unrecognizable and vanished as the dark side of the Moon. And yet, the same roof in Bukhara probably still roosts the same stork, or another so like it that the picture might have been taken yesterday rather than one hundred and three years ago.
Lovely, fascinating exhibit; well worth a moment to look.(h/t to Ed at Gin and Tacos for the link...)
Chief,
ReplyDeletei can look at old photos all day long and never get tired or bored.
nice pics.
jim
My Russian is almost totally gone, Chief...but the title?
ReplyDelete"Lost World"? Am I close?
A look into a lost world. Amazing what a bit of color can do.
ReplyDeletejim - me, too. As Ael noted, these are specially amazing because of the color - you don't get that weird sense of "this is old dried-up history" you get from B&W; it's like you could step outside and see them yourself...
ReplyDeleteLabrys: As close as I can get, yeah; my Army Russian pretty much stopped at "Hands up!" and I haven't gone much beyond that since.
I usually don't care much for colourized pictures but these are quite well done. However there is a very antiseptic feel to them, very sterile.
ReplyDeleteFascinating peek at a lost world.
LOL...what Chief?? You didn't memorize the basics?
ReplyDelete"Hello", "I love you", "Good bye" and oh....the biggie:
"Don't shoot, I know secrets!"
Infantry officers, seeing my MI insignia, used to stop me on the street in Berlin and flirt by asking me to teach them "essential Russian"....I laughingly complied, teaching them those four phases, and if they were cute enough, added a fifth, "Gimme a beer, please."
Leon: My understanding is that what makes these so vibrant is that they're NOT colorized - the original glass plates were done in an odd sort of pre-Kodak color separation; these are genuine color originals, which, I think, accounts for their vibrancy and life.
ReplyDeleteLabrys: I had viele Deutsch, which my USAREUR buddies assured me the frauleins verstehe'd. And since Uncle Ronnie was unable to convince me that we would be marching into Kiev anytime soon, I didn't worry too much about говоря русский.
Weirdly enough, I learned a little bit of soldier Vietnamese; as a privvit my senior NCOs were all VN vets, and so I learned that I was "bac se" (doc) and if somebody was hit I had to "didi mau len" (run fast) and "canmot medevac bayjao" (get a medevac now).
Thank you for sharing -- a nice glimpse into worlds away in time, and yet ... many are still extant.
ReplyDelete