Antique & Vintage Postcards

The flamboyant Gothic facade of St. Anne's Church in Wilno blazes in warm terracotta tones against a brooding sky — a structure so beautiful that Napoleon reportedly wished he could carry it back to Paris in the palm of his hand. This pre-war Polish-language card, published in Wilno by the Znicz press and photographed and zinc-plate reproduced by F. Zaniewski, captures the church during the interwar period when the city was part of the Second Polish Republic — a city known simultaneously as Wilno (Polish), Vilna (Yiddish), and today's Vilnius (Lithuanian). The intricate brick lacework of the façade's 33 differently shaped turrets is rendered with remarkable fidelity for a period lithograph. A lone pedestrian figure in period dress grounds the scene in the 1920s–1930s streetscape. This unused card is a rare artifact of a vanished political and cultural world, printed by a Wilno-based publisher that ceased to exist with the Soviet occupation of 1940.