Friday 15 January 2016

Passport Portraits of Yesteryear No. 13

Continuing the series of passport photographs from my collection.
Peruse and wonder.


Basilio Bisuda and his wife, Elena. It is 1931 and this Italian couple with their two children have settled in Cluj, Romania. The city of Cluj, capital of Transylvania, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th Century when it was called Klausenberg. In 1931 it still has a powerful Hungarian majority population dominating the lives of the indigenous Romanians.

Basilio and his family travel to Milan in Italy for Christmas 1938, returning to Cluj to take up their residence again in 1939. And when Mussolini joins Hitler in his enterprise, in 1940 the two dictators cede Cluj and Transylvania to Hungary and it becomes Klausenberg once again.

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