The same neo-Gothic palace façade, with its slender spired tower and the smaller turret rising beside it, already seen in the old postcards and photographs throughout this exhibition — only here photographed quite recently. Almost every window is boarded up with planks or sheet metal, the roof is patched tin, and construction-site fencing stands right in front of the great pointed-arch doors, marking that it is no longer safe to enter. Unkempt grass grows around the foundations.
This photograph is the first in a series showing the condition the palace was in when the estate was acquired. Exhibit No. 19 already mentioned that after independence was restored, the estate kept changing owners for a long time and languished — this image is direct evidence of that long decline: the same ornate, architect-designed façade composition, described in so many exhibits in this exhibition, stood abandoned, boarded up and fenced off for decades.
Unlike the old photographs and postcards, this frame is not archival but real and already in colour, so the animation doesn't colour anything here. The only change is that the camera slowly moves closer to the façade, as if inviting a closer look at the state the palace was found in before restoration work began.