Pappfalva near Kirlibaba

In the description of the fighting in Bukovina, you can read about Pappfalva village. There is also a postcard that says it was made there. In this picture you can see a river, a narrow gauge railway line and a country road on the shore. All this is in a rather narrow valley, on one side of which there are also some houses.

There are several exciting questions. The first is definitely where this part of the settlement is and where is Pappfalva today? My friend Gábor Vásárhelyi, who is a researcher of the battlefield in Bukovina, thinks that Pappfalva is no longer to be found, it is a part of Kirlibaba. This is possible, as the administrative area of ​​Kirlibaba, the old mining village, now includes at least 5-6 smaller or larger groups of houses in addition to the two-street village center. One of these may have been Pappfalva, namely one of the parts through which the railway, the Prislopbahn built during the war, passed. This line stretched from Borsa to Jakobeny, a little further away, I had written about it before here. Based on the photo and today’s map of the settlement, I think that Pappfalva was located southeast of Kirlibaba, next to the railway line, between Kirlibaba and Jakobeny on the banks of Aranyos Beszterce.

The other exciting question concerns the name of the settlement. Was it named after Colonel Daniel Papp, whose brigade had been in the Kirlibaba area for a long time? This idea would be very tempting, but so far I have not found any evidence or reference to it.

Of course, I enclose the badge of the Papp Brigade with the post. This shows no houses, but a flood of Russian bears flowing towards the chap on guard. This badge was also featured earlier here.