Only vintage postcards can cheer me up on an evening like this....

After just a few weeks post-Caucasus, I'm starting to feel that travel drought, that feeling of ultimate boredom in a place. Don't get me wrong I do like Reading, but I live to travel. I really do....

I must let you all in on a secret, perhaps a little obsession of mine, I am a collector at heart and one of my newest (within the last year) fascinations is vintage postcards and old holiday photographs. I love the whole allure of an old postcard, what a poignant symbol to mark the sheer romanticism of foreign travel during the last century. It's that same romanticism which still manages to entice me time and time again.

The postcards you see before you are those I picked up on my last trip to the Caucasus found in the Sunday Flea-Market in Tbilisi and the Vernissage Market in Yerevan. It was like Christmas had come again whilst I was sat on the dirty ground sifting through box after box of old photographs, postcards and general memorabilia. I picked them up all at very good prices too - 10p or so per postcard, not bad not bad!

I also need to explain something, ever since I turned about 14, I have been very fascinated with the Former Soviet Union and the counties of the now CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States). Something I still really don't know - how any why this fascination occurred as such? I feel these postcards sum up in some form my original appeal to this area (minus the Istanbul postcard). The postcards visualise this place I still yearn to understand. In terms of my fascination of the USSR, I will never really understand. This is why buying these postcards also feels so special to me, these photographs produced in this time - this era bygone. I would have loved to understand, visit and to have even lived in this time. All of these places (minus Abkhazia) I have now seen with my own eyes. But that 'vision' united on all the postcards....I will never truly see.

Tbilisi City Panorama, Georgia. Date Unknown

Lake Sevan, Armenia. 1980

Building of the Government, Baku, Azerbaijan. Date Unknown

Sukhumi, Abkhazia. Date Unknown

Sukhumi, Abkhazia. Date Unknown

Sukhumi, Abkhazia. Date Unknown

Istanbul, Turkey. Date Unknown

Black Sea, Russia. Date Unknown

Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Russia. 1979

© All images copyright the original photographers