From public archives

Photographed in 1917 · Featured from 2026-08-12

Summer 1917, eastern side of Avram Iancu Square in Cluj — the city is under Austro-Hungarian administration, yet the war consuming Europe has not yet erased the daily routines of its residents. The facades lining the eastern edge form a scene of urban sobriety typical of a Central European provincial center caught between two eras. The square already bore the name of the Romanian revolutionary, a sign of the identity tensions that would redraw the region's map just one year later. What we see here is a space suspended in the final months of an old order.

Photographed in 1930 · Featured from 2026-07-22

The Palace of Justice in Brașov, photographed in 1930, carries the characteristic severity of interwar institutional architecture — massive volumes, an imposing façade, a building designed to project authority. The postcard was published by "Cartea Românească" Press, Brașov branch, which says something about the city's cultural vitality: a publishing house with national ambitions was extending its network into Transylvania. The palace itself had been built during the Austro-Hungarian period and was by then serving the judiciary of Greater Romania. The color postcard, nine by fourteen centimeters, belongs to a common interwar practice — documenting urban life through picture postcards, the only "visual archive" accessible to the general public.

Photographed in 1914 · Featured from 2026-07-17

Cluj in 1914 looks strikingly different along Wesselényi Miklós-utca — today's Calea Regelui Ferdinand — from anything we would recognise now. The street has carried many names over the years, from Híd utcza to Gheorghe Doja, each renaming marking a shift in regime or official language. The postcard was published by Schuster Emil in the same year Europe went to war, making this quiet city corner a witness to a world on the verge of disappearing.