Antique & Vintage Postcards

A procession of Balinese women in vivid sarongs and elaborate floral headdresses winds through a brilliant emerald rice paddy beneath two ornate gold-fringed ceremonial umbrellas (tedung), led by a bare-chested young man bearing a lacquered red staff — the crowd of onlookers pressing against the treeline behind them suggests this is no private ritual but a full community odalan temple anniversary or ngaben purification ceremony, captured in saturated Chrome-era color by photographer K. Sujana. The Balinese Hindu tradition of fetching and processing tirta (holy water) through living rice fields — rice being the body of the goddess Dewi Sri — gives the scene its sacred geometry: the straight green rows of padi, the diagonal procession line, the vertical umbrellas. An unused card, it retains the clean graphic power of 1970s–80s Indonesian tourism photography at its most sincere.