Fifty Photographs: selections from SCUA collections

Therapeutic magic in Macedonia

by Joseph Obrebski, Macedonia, ca.1932

As Europe in the 1930s lunged toward a modernity marked by mechanization and dehumanization, deep strains of traditional life survived in its remote corners. In a mood at once somber and serene, the Polish ethnographer, Joseph Obrebski, captures a magical moment in a dim peasant hut in the mountains of Macedonia when a woman suffering from the evil eye and hunger was healed.