Early motoring with central European royalty

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Big vintage cars, a remote and desolate mountain range and some rather sinister looking men who might be checkpoint guards or military police - it all looks a bit like the backdrop to a Bulldog Drummond adventure. Unfortunately, we don't know exactly what's going on in these pictures, but the all the uniformed men were probably a necessary presence considering the cars happen to be transporting two of the most senior members of Austro-Hungarian royalty.

We're not really in any position to speculate, though, so we'll turn our attention to that element of the photographs which actually concerns us: the four handsome motor-cars. What exactly are they? Notes accompanying the photos gives us some clues.

The first photograph was apparently taken by Anton Vilar, a Slovene photographer and also a composer, in Logatec, a small town in western Slovenia. The dashing torpedo tourer is being driven by a rather proud-looking man, and he obviously means business because he's turned his headlights back-to-front. Our instinct suggested to us that it might be a German car and a look at some Opels seemed to confirm our thoughts. We'd say it's an Opel 6/12 PS. We have one more question, though: is that a gecko stuck to his radiator?

The second photograph is even better, and we have even more detail. One of the gentlemen - surely the tall, well-groomed fellow in the long motoring coat - is named in Serbo-Croatian as Nadvojvoda Evgen Avstrijski, or Archduke Eugene of Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia. Bohemia is the setting, the photogaph having been taken in the mountains near Prague in 1916. We presume the car on the right to be his one, and we think it's a Gräf & Stift. We're not quite so sure about the one on the left, though. Is it another Opel, but of slightly later manufacture?

The final photograph is also dated 1916, and shows Cesar Karel I, or Charles I of Austria to you and me. The location is Tolmin, a small town in the Slovenian Alps close to the Italian border, but without a radiator to give us a hand, the car's identity has us stumped, so it's over to you...

Words: Zack Stiling; photographs: Peter Skofic
 

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