Apartment Buildings

As with so many photos we find in our file, we know this one was taken in former Yugoslavia, but we don’t know which city.

As we traveled in the former Iron Curtain countries, we saw miles and miles of thousands of uninteresting apartment buildings, constructed with what we called Socialist architecture. No one cared what the buildings looked like, and thousands of them, in a half dozen countries, looked much alike.

However, in former Yugoslavia they had a different idea, most of the time. In the cities of Postjana, Pristina, Skopje, Pula, Split and many others, the apartment buildings would have been accepted as an improvement most anywhere in the world.

Perhaps the most unusual Iron Curtain apartment buildings were in Gdansk, Poland. Can you imagine a 14 story building, 500 meters long? That’s 1,650 feet, a third of a mile. How about a building 700 meter long, that housed 13,000 people. The locals called it something like, “The ants nest.”