Planet seller

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Planet seller with parrot

Selling planets is a historical profession that was mainly practiced in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century .

description

The planet sellers were street vendors in Vienna who sold "lucky letters", which were called "planets". These letters usually contained several winning numbers with which the buyer could take part in a lottery . The lucky letters were offered from a tray . The peculiarity of the planet vendors was that they did not pull the letters out of the tray themselves, but had trained parrots or white mice do the job.

Occasionally, horoscopes and other predictions were sold instead of winning numbers .

Planet sellers were common in Vienna until the Second World War , after which they disappeared more and more from the cityscape. One of the last active planet sellers has been handed down from the 1970s; he was mainly to be found in Mariahilfer Strasse .

Others

For the Munich suburban wedding in 2017, the actor Andreas Bittl appeared as a planet seller .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Katharina Schneider: 1001 reasons to love Austria . Amalthea Signum Verlag, Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-902862-64-8 , p. 242 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  2. ^ Leopold Schmidt: Wiener Volkskunde. An outline. In: Association for Folklore (Hrsg.): Wiener Zeitschrift für Volkskunde . Vienna 1940, p. 119 .
  3. Gesa Schölgens: These ten professions have died out. Frankfurter Rundschau, January 30, 2015, accessed on September 13, 2017 .
  4. Josef Kneitinger: "Bäff" as a wedding loader on the way. Mittelbayerische Zeitung, June 1, 2017, accessed on September 13, 2017 .