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Thread: Russian family and strange-looking mandolin

  1. #26
    Michael Reichenbach
    Join Date
    Feb 2005
    Location
    Freiburg Germany
    Posts
    484

    Default Re: Russian family and strange-looking mandolin

    Postcard from my collection with a similar mandolin:
    Click image for larger version. 

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    Homepage: www.mandoisland.de / Blog: www.mandoisland.com / Freiburg / Germany

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  3. #27

    Default Re: Russian family and strange-looking mandolin

    Bingo! Thank you, Michael.

    It is amazing on one hand, quite unsurprising on the other. The wares that were traded in Russia's Far East must have been as diverse as the people who lived there. So it is not at all hard to imagine that a German-made mandolin would have been among them.

    Cheers,

    Victor
    It is not man that lives but his work. (Ioannis Kapodistrias)

  4. #28

    Default Re: Russian family and strange-looking mandolin

    It is amazing how good the supply was in the Imperial Russia and in fact how cosmopolitan it was in that respect. It literally had everything imaginable and beyond and with the rich Russians being very generous it was an enterpreneur's dream. They had department stores like Muir & Mirrielees of the highest standard (an old London's Harrods comes to mind, where you could buy an elefant or so say said) where any consumer's fantasy was eagerly catered for.

  5. #29

    Default Re: Russian family and strange-looking mandolin

    My next related research-project will be rummaging through an old, rosewood closet where my great-grandmother kept all sorts of family heirlooms; rather incredibly, my long-lost cousin has retained that bulky, hand-carved, warped piece of furniture hidden away in my grandfather's workshop. It is beyond incredible, considering he built that little shack with his own hands, back in 1950. The family acquired that lot after the area around the military airport was decommissioned from security-zone status in 1949, after WWII. The original house has been demolished, yet the little shack still stands.

    I do not know whether my ancestors could actually read music but it's definitely something worth looking into. I know that they could certainly read, they were literate in general, and in fact had several books in Russian like Lives of Saints and the like, annotated by hand in the margins for useful reference to religious admonitions on the daily practice of Christian virtue plus, rather mysteriously (at least to myself) several books in French, which of course would have been useless to someone who didn't understand French at all. So they just may have also known how to read music...

    A more ambitious project would be to accept my ever generous little cousin's gift of that entire closet, have it dismantled, and hand over the wood to some creative luthier for him to build me a whole new mandolin from its beautiful rosewood. Hmm...
    It is not man that lives but his work. (Ioannis Kapodistrias)

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