THIS IS how Siberian towns — where millions of deportees once lived — probably used to look. The wooden village in the picture, however, is not in Siberia, but in in eastern Slovakia.
Podspády lies under the Belianske Tatry Mountains, not far from the Jurgów border crossing to Poland. Here, in the midst of the forest, a gamekeeper’s house was erected in the middle of the 19th century.
As trees were more than plentiful in the area, construction of a sawmill soon followed.
An aerial cableway was then built in 1922 to transport goods to the Slovak town of Lendak, which is 13 kilometres from Podspády. But the sawmill was later closed and only a few foresters continued to live in the wood houses during the following years.
This postcard shows the village of Podspády in the period shortly after the first world war.
