A little bit of history from a postage stamp

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 Like everyone else, I'm following the news from Ukraine closely and hoping that sanity will prevail in the Kremlin (talk about forlorn hopes...).


I have a stamp collection that I'm very fond of, though I don't do much with it these days.  Anybody familiar with the Howling Frog blog will know that I'm always interested in Eastern Europe/Russia/other bits, and that extends to stamps too.  Stamps from the USSR are quite easy to come by; Communist bloc countries produced a lot of pretty stamps for collectors as a revenue stream and as a kid I particularly liked the Polish stamps with lavish illustrations of horses, for example.  So I have lots of USSR stamps. 

I also have quite a few German stamps from Weimar and WWII.  They're fascinating because they're often overprinted with astronomical numbers to deal with inflation, or with the names of occupied nations.  I have a couple of 1941 Hitler portrait stamps with "Ukraine" printed on them.

 Old postage stamps from an independent Ukraine, however, are not that common.  I didn't learn how to identify Ukrainian stamps like I did Hungarian (Magyar Posta) or USSR (Почта СССР) stamps.  I have just one Ukrainan stamp, and didn't really know anything about it, so I looked it up.


 There were only two sets of stamp issues from independent Ukraine before it became a member of the USSR, plus one set from the Ukrainian SSR.  This stamp is from the second set and was produced in late 1920.  It shows Bodhan Khmelnytsky (1593-1657), a leader of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and a truly horrible person.  The website Stamp Collecting World has an interesting story about it:

In August 1920, the Ukrainian National Republic decided to issue a new set of pictorial postage stamps, exemplifying the character of Ukraine and its people.  These fourteen Ukraine stamps were designed by Mykola Ivasiuk (1865-1937), a prominent Ukrainian painter of the time.  The stamps were printed by the Military Geographic Institute in Vienna, and they were delivered to the Ukrainian government in late 1920.  They are referred to by philatelists as the Vienna Issue.

Unfortunately, the collapse of the Ukrainian National Republic was imminent by the end of 1920, and these new stamps were NEVER ISSUED.  These stamps, though they were never officially issued, are considered the most impressive Ukraine stamps ever created.

So I think that's a really neat little piece of history.  That's why I like stamps -- they're little bits of history that show me things to think about.  Now I know why my stamp has no postmark, and who Khmelnytsky was, and a bit more how difficult it has been for Ukraine to keep its independence.

Слава україні!

 

Comments

  1. BronaMarch 9, 2022 at 12:48 AM

    Thank you for reminding about why I loved collecting stamps as a child, for the history lesson and for just being you. This is exactly why I love this blogging life :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanMarch 9, 2022 at 9:54 AM

      Aw, thanks, Brona! Me too. It's so nice to be able to make friends across the world in this way.

      Delete

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