Antique & Vintage Postcards

Five men in dark suits and straw hats lounge on a timber landing stage as the massive cylindrical bulk of the Kamerlengo Fortress rises from the water behind them — its Venetian lion-of-St-Mark escutcheon still crisp on the ashlar coursing, the crenellated parapet silhouetted against a pale Dalmatian sky. This is Trogir (then part of the Austro-Hungarian crown land of Dalmatia), photographed around 1900–1910 by local publisher Ivan Belas, whose name appears on the reverse alongside the Croatian word Dopisnica (postcard). The caption reads Sredovječne tvrdjave — "Medieval Fortresses" — a fitting title for a tower begun by Venetian engineers in 1420 and still standing guard over the narrow channel between Trogir island and Čiovo. The undivided-style reverse with its single-language imprint places production in the early divided-back era, roughly 1905–1915. The second image is an enlarged photographic detail from the same negative, printed separately, giving collectors a rare dual-format look at this Adriatic gem.