Zamek czernelicki na fotografiach z końca XIX-XX wieku
The Chernelytsia Castle in Photographs from the Late 19th–20th Century

Summary/Abstract: For a long time, it was believed that the Chernelytsia Castle in Pokuttia did not attract much attention from artists due to its relatively small size and remoteness from the main roads. This should have resulted in a small amount of illustrative material, primarily photographs, depicting the castle. However, the actual situation is different. Over the last ten years, archival and library searches conducted by a team of Polish and Ukrainian researchers have made it possible to discover, identify, date, and publish numerous photographs of the Chernelytsia Castle. The discovered photographs are stored in the National Library in Warsaw, the Archive of the Department of Polish Architecture at Warsaw University of Technology, the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Karta Center in Warsaw, the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv, the Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv, the Scientific and Technical Archive of the Institute ‘Ukrzakhidproektrestavratsiya’ in Lviv, and the private collections of Oleksandr Kahlian, Levko Kvyatkovskyy, and Vitaliy Nagirnyy. All currently known photographs of the Chernelytsia Castle were taken between the 1880s to 1990s using the traditional method and classic photographic equipment. The earliest ones date back to the 1880s and were made by Kolomyian photographer Juliusz Dutkiewicz in 1880 for the Ethnographic Exhibition of Pokuttya in Kolomyia. Over the next few years, photographs of the castle by an unknown author (1884) and Albin Fridrich (between 1892 and 1904) appeared. A large number of photographs of the Chernelytsia Castle were taken in the interwar period. In 1921, 7 photographs of the castle were taken by an unknown photographer on the request of the Conservative Club in Lviv. Another 23 photographs of the fortress were taken in 1935 by Bogdan Guerquin. In addition, during this period, a number of other single photographs of the castle were taken by unidentified authors, which are currently preserved in private collections. The photographs of the Chernelytsia Castle from the second half of the 20th century by Ostap Kudybin (second half of the 1960s) and Ihor Starosolskyy (1969-1971) are of great importance. The significance of these photographs cannot be overestimated. They are a unique source that allows us not only to show the state of the castle in different periods, from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, but also to illustrate the dynamics of changes and losses of fortifications, and even to try to reconstruct the original appearance of the historical monument. Some of the photographs described in the article have been published before, while others are published for the first time.

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