Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts

Friday, September 02, 2022

Added to my collection September 2022

 This will just be a post with all the stamps that I added to my collections in September 2022


September 1st

Belgium 1925 Kings Leopold I and Albert I

Belgium 1925 Kings Leopold I and Albert I

75th Anniversary of Belgian postage stamps. These were sold only in sets and only bu the Administration of Posts, not at all post offices

Scott numbers:  172/184

Michel numbers: 191/203


September 2nd


Germany 1912 Semiofficial Flight Stamp Margateten Volksfest Winged Man 50pf

Germany 1912 Semiofficial Flight Stamp Margateten Volksfest Winged Man 50pf

Michel number 4a

Could these be Daedalus And Icarus? The catalog just says winged man


France 1942 Private Issue Legion Des Volontaires 

France 1942 Private Issue Legion Des Volontaires

Action committee of the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism

Michel II/V


September 12th

Austria number 1

Austria number 1

That completes the first issue for Austria (1-5)

Now my messy page 1 looks like this

Austria Page 1

September 12th

Netherlands 1928 Olympic Games set

NVPH catalog 212/219, finally I completed this set  :-)

I only need 99 stamps to complete Netherlands till 1990 including semi postal stamps...

Netherlands 1928 Olympic Games set  NVPH catalog 212/219

September 17th

Europa CEPT stamps

Europa CEPT stamps from Iceland, Germany, Yugoslavia and Greece

Cept Iceland Germany

Cept Greece

Europa Cept Yugoslavia sheets

Netherlands Booklets

The Tintin (Kuifje) one is my favorite

Netherlands Booklets


France 1949, centenary of French stamps

Scott number 626

France 1949 Centenary Ceres Scott 624

Netherlands William III 1913 5 Guilder

Just missing the 10 guilder from this set now :-)

Netherlands William III 1913 5 Guilder

Franz Joseph stamps from Austria

I already have a bunch of these but I need to check the various types as well as the numerous perforations that exist for these stamps (always a pain in the neck  :-) )

Austria Franz Joseph to check types and perforations


Sunday, July 28, 2019

July 28 in stamps Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Stalin issues Order No. 227, Beatrix Potter

Here are some events that happened on July 28th. It could be an event or a person that died or was born on that day



1741 Died: Antonio Vivaldi, Italian violinist and composer (b. 1678)

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (4 March 1678 – 28 July 1741) was an Italian Baroque musical composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher, and priest. Born in Venice, the capital of the Venetian Republic, he is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe. He composed many instrumental concertos, for the violin and a variety of other instruments, as well as sacred choral works and more than forty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as the Four Seasons.

Many of his compositions were written for the all-female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned children. Vivaldi had worked there as a Catholic priest for 1 1/2 years and was employed there from 1703 to 1715 and from 1723 to 1740. Vivaldi also had some success with expensive stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, Vivaldi moved to Vienna, hoping for royal support. However, the Emperor died soon after Vivaldi's arrival, and Vivaldi himself died, in poverty, less than a year later.

Some stamps from Italy, Monaco and FYR of Macedonia depicting Vivaldi


Antonio Vivaldi, Italian violinist and composer

Antonio Vivaldi, Italian violinist and composer

Antonio Vivaldi, Italian violinist and composer




1750 Died: Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer (b. 1685)

Johann Sebastian Bach[ (31 March 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Art of Fugue, the Brandenburg Concertos, and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Western musical canon.

The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After being orphaned at age 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph Bach, after which he continued his musical development in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar—where he expanded his repertoire for the organ—and Köthen—where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St. Thomas) in Leipzig.

He composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university's student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he published some of his keyboard music. In Leipzig, as had happened during some of his earlier positions, he had difficult relations with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by his sovereign, Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, in 1736. In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.


Some stamps and a First Day Cover depicting Bach and or his work


Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer FDC

Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer

Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer

Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer

Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer

Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer

Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer

Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer

Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer



1866 Born: Beatrix Potter, English children's book writer and illustrator (d. 1943)

Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Born into an upper-middle-class household, Potter was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children. She had numerous pets and spent holidays in Scotland and the Lake District, developing a love of landscape, flora, and fauna, all of which she closely observed and painted.

Though Potter was typical of women of her generation in having limited opportunities for higher education, her study and watercolours of fungi led to her being widely respected in the field of mycology. In her thirties, Potter self-published the highly successful children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Following this, Potter began writing and illustrating children's books full-time.

In all, Potter wrote thirty books; the best known being her twenty-three children's tales. With the proceeds from the books and a legacy from an aunt, in 1905 Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, a village in the Lake District which at that time was in Lancashire. Over the following decades, she purchased additional farms to preserve the unique hill country landscape. In 1913, at the age of 47, she married William Heelis, a respected local solicitor from Hawkshead. Potter was also a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep and a prosperous farmer keenly interested in land preservation. She continued to write and illustrate, and to design spin-off merchandise based on her children's books for British publisher Warne until the duties of land management and her diminishing eyesight made it difficult to continue.

Potter died of pneumonia and heart disease on 22 December 1943 at her home in Near Sawrey at the age of 77, leaving almost all her property to the National Trust. She is credited with preserving much of the land that now constitutes the Lake District National Park. Potter's books continue to sell throughout the world in many languages with her stories being retold in song, film, ballet, and animation, and her life depicted in a feature film and television film.

Stamps from Great Britain and Isle of Man depicting Beatrix Potter's characters


Isle of Man Tales of Beatrix Potter

Great Britain Beatrix Potter Stories

Great Britain 2016 Beatrix Potter Miniature Sheet




1942 – World War II: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin issues Order No. 227. In response to alarming German advances, all those who retreat or otherwise leave their positions without orders to do so are to be tried in a military court, with punishment ranging from duty in a shtrafbat battalion, imprisonment in a Gulag, or execution

Order No. 227 was an order issued on 28 July 1942 by Joseph Stalin, who was acting as the People's Commissar of Defence. It is known for its line "Not a step back!" (Russian: Ни шагу назад!, romanized: Ni shagu nazad!), which became the primary slogan of the Soviet press in summer 1942.

The order established that each front must create one to three penal battalions, which were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front lines. From 1942 to 1945, a total of 422,700 Red Army personnel were sentenced to penal battalions as a result of courts-martial.The order also directed that each army must create "blocking detachments" at the rear that would shoot "panic-mongers and cowards".[1] In the first three months, blocking detachments shot 1,000 penal troops and sent 24,000 to penal battalions. By October 1942, the idea of regular blocking detachments was quietly dropped.


Russian stamp from 1945 with the text "not a step back"

World War II: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin issues Order No. 227. In response to alarming German advances, all those who retreat or otherwise leave their positions without orders to do so are to be tried in a military court, with punishment ranging from duty in a shtrafbat battalion, imprisonment in a Gulag, or execution

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

July 17th in stamps Catherine the Great, Romanov family, Spanish Civil War

Here are some events that happened on July 17th. It could be an event or a person that died or was born on that day



1762 – Catherine II becomes tsar of Russia upon the murder of Peter III of Russia.



Catherine II (2 May [O.S. 21 April] 1729 – 17 November [O.S. 6 November] 1796), also known as Catherine the Great (Екатери́на Вели́кая, Yekaterina Velikaya), born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, was Empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796, the country's longest-ruling female leader. She came to power following a coup d'état that she organised—resulting in her husband, Peter III, being overthrown. Under her reign, Russia was revitalised; it grew larger and stronger and was recognised as one of the great powers of Europe

Stamps from Russia depicting Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great Russia 2004

Catherine the Great Russia


1918 – Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his immediate family and retainers are executed by Bolshevik Chekists at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

In the early hours of 17 July 1918, the royal family was awakened around 2:00 am, got dressed, and were led down into a half-basement room at the back of the Ipatiev house. The pretext for this move was the family's safety, i.e. that anti-Bolshevik forces were approaching Yekaterinburg, and the house might be fired upon

Nicholas was carrying his son. When the family arrived in the basement, the former empress complained that there were no chairs for them to sit on. Yurovsky ordered two chairs brought in, and when the empress and the heir were seated, the executioners filed into the room. Yurovsky announced to them that the Ural Soviet of Workers' Deputies had decided to execute them. A stunned Nicholas asked, "What? What?" and turned toward his family. Yurovsky quickly repeated the order and Nicholas said, according to Peter Ermakov, "You know not what you do."

The executioners drew handguns and began shooting; Nicholas was the first to die


Some Russian stamps depicting Tsar Nicholas II

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia


1936 – Spanish Civil War: An Armed Forces rebellion against the recently elected leftist Popular Front government of Spain starts the civil war.


The Spanish Civil War (Spanish: Guerra Civil Española) took place from 1936 to 1939. Republicans loyal to the elected, left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, in alliance with the Anarchists and Communists, fought against a revolt by the Nationalists, an alliance of Falangists, Monarchists, Carlists, conservatives and Catholics, led by a military clique among whom General Francisco Franco soon achieved a preponderant role. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war had many facets, and different views saw it as class struggle, a war of religion, a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, between fascism and communism. It has been frequently called the "dress rehearsal" for World War II.

The Nationalists won the war, which ended in early 1939, and ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975.

Some Spanish Civil War stamps







Tuesday, January 22, 2019

The revenge of Yugoslavia on Bosnian stamps of 1906

I acquired a set of stamps from Bosnia Hercegovina which have a bunch of holes in them. The page where these stamps were placed had a little note


Here is what is said on this note


This is the famous pictorial set of Bosnia Herzegovina issued in 1906 when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was in Sarajevo, its capital, where the shot was fired by Gavrilo Princip which killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914.  This shot is what started World War I and ended with the partition of the once proud Austro-Hungarian Empire.



The new country was formed in 1918 immediately after World War I as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by union of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and the Kingdom of Serbia. It was commonly referred to at the time as the "Versailles state". Later, the government renamed the country leading to the first official use of Yugoslavia in 1929.

Bosnia Herzegovina became part of that new country in 1918 to which it was always tied racially. With freedom came revenge. So strong and fierce was their hatred for everything Austrian that the Bosnian destroyed and demolished everything left by their former rulers.

Nor have these stamps escapes the national wrath. These stamps were defaced by having holes punched through them and then were ordered to be sold as a symbol to remind the world how Yugoslavia has taken her revenge on the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Here is the set of stamps which have holes through them




Below you can see a bigger version of the 5 Kronen stamp with Franz Joseph







In 1918 these stamps were overprinted with Država SHS Bosna i Hergegovina (Country SHS, Bosnia and Hercegovina) as well as with Kraljestvo Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca (Kingdom of Serb, Croats and Slovenes)