← previous day

Our house - Cigel, Slovakia

Posted by Michael Skorulski (Cigel, Slovakia) on 24 March 2008 in Architecture and Portfolio.

A day after most of the spring snow has melted. A little snow lingers on the roof.

My father-in-law's family built the house during the Second World War of stone and timber gathered in the mountains. One end of the house was a shed with a few animals.

During the war, German soldiers occupied the village because partisan fighters operated in the surrounding mountains. Their barracks was the old schoolhouse where my wife later went to school.

One evening, my father-in-law, then a 12-year-old boy, heard a racket coming from the livestock shed. He peered out the front window nervously to see a German soldier walking off quickly with something bulging and moving under his coat. Later the family counted their chickens and found one was missing. It seems the occupiers were just as short of food as the occupied.

When my wife and I renovated the house we replaced the roof beams of the shed section which were rotted from the breath of the animals. We put the metal roof on in 1988 while the communists still ran the country. The aluminum roofing was considered a hard-to-find material at the time. We chopped the flat stones for the patio and path out of a quarry in the mountains.
next day →

PENTAX Optio A30
ISO 64
8 mm