Mank, Austria

But why? Well, I spent my childhood holidays there--and now I'll take you along a quite particular trip down memory lane

I was travelling this week, hence the slightly-reduced posting. In case you’re wondering, I went to Vienna, Austria, to take care of some work-related “stuff”, such as Janko Paunović’s dissertation defence (it went very well, and it’s Dr. Paunović now).

I also spent some time chatting with my parents, and while I’ve done several postings about my hometown, including the area I grew up in, Vienna’s 8th District:

All Saints Special: Maria Treu, Vienna

Today, however, I’ll take you along another part of that particular memory lane—by taking you to the small town where my father grew up and where I was fortunate to spend many school holiday with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and my cousins in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And now I’ll take you along for the ride.

As to background, here’s a bit from the German Wikipedia entry:

Mank was first mentioned in documents in 1146. Almost 550 years later, the first school was built in the municipality. In 1679, 62 people died of the plague, which is commemorated today by a plague column in the main square. In 1851, Mank became a market town and ten years later already had almost 1,000 inhabitants. On 7 May 1987, Mank was elevated to town status by the Lower Austrian state parliament.

Here’s an aerial view—a “true photograph”—mailed in August 1937, which shows the main church of St Mary’s on the right-hand side and the centre of the town:

Speaking of St Mary’s, here’s a close-up of the main intersection:

Below, another “street view” of the town in the later 1950s: clearly visible is the church (it’s as if you’d taken a left-hand turn on the above postcard—this is the road you’d take to visit my uncle):

If you’d taken a right-hand turn, you’d eventually end up taking the road that led to my grandparents’ house, which you can see in the below postcard to the right of the large building in the centre (which is a secondary school)—and you know what’s even better than that? My grandmother actually wrote that one and sent it to my aunt in the 1960s:

While I’m not old enough to have seen Mank in greyscale, the two postcards below are from the 1970s and 1980s, and they’re about how I remember the place:

“Greetings from Mank”, with my grandparents’ house across the street from the multi-storey buildings in the top-right image; the inn “Riedl-Schönerer” in the middle image in the lower row is highly recommended.

And with that aerial view, our little trip down (my very own) memory lane comes to a close; my grandparents lived right next to the cemetery in the background (remember those multi-storey buildings I mentioned before? If so, you can identify the area).

That postcard is from around 1980, which is close enough to how I remember the place. Lots of good memories, even though much has changed since I spent my childhood holidays there.