WORTH A SECOND GLANCE

AN AIRPORT IN DISGUISE

If a postcard show has yielded little of interest, many collectors invest a bit of time in flipping through boxes of cheap unsorted modern cards in the hope that, among the beach hotels, landscapes and cathedrals, there may be the odd item of aviation interest. It is likely however that this card would be passed over in any such search – there are certainly no aircraft to be seen. It appears to be either what the English call a stately home, or maybe a church, municipal building or museum. The style is Classical, with 10 Greco-Roman style columns and  a bell tower and it is set in what appears to be a small town square, with few cars and, as ever on postcards, the sky is blue. So, what is it, a small town centre in the Mediterranean ?  - perhaps the answer is on the back. Partially, as it has a pre-printed stamp from the old Soviet Union but everything else is in Cyrillic script.

To cut a long story short this is an Airport postcard, albeit landside. The “bell tower” is in fact the control tower. The site is Lvov, then in the USSR in the part of Europe that gave rise to the following story. A journalist is interviewing the oldest inhabitant of a village, who describes how she was born in Austria, then for a few years lived alternately in Poland and Russia, then for a few years in Germany, then decades back in Russia and finally, here in the Ukraine. He remarks on how much she has traveled in her long life but she replies “Oh No, I have never left this village”. The “village” could have been Lvov. Founded in the 13th century in Eastern Galicia, the city of Lvov was under Austrian rule from 1772 to 1918; Polish, from independence in 1918 until annexation to Soviet Russia in late September, 1939; German, after the German offensive of June, 1941; and in the Soviet Union again, following the defeat of Germany in 1945. Presently it is within the borders of the recently independent state of the Ukraine.

Few buildings in Lvov ( or its aliases of Lemburg, Lwow or Lviv)  would have survived WW2 and the airport was probably constructed in the same phase of Stalin-era reconstruction that gave Moscow its “Wedding Cake” skyscrapers. 

To confirm the diagnosis that this is indeed an airport, the same building is seen on another Soviet card, this time from airside with the tail of an Aeroflot Antonov An10 to prove the point.

To add to the confusion this latter card is also all in Cyrillic, but in this case only the Ukrainian form, while the landside card at least had both the Russian and Ukrainian forms, where the forms of Lwow are, as near as can be got on a western keyboard   ^bBOB  and ^bBIB.