1 9 5 5 / R O M A N I A
Dear friends !
During the twelve months of 2006 I will present interesting items of the
twelve oldest Volleyball stamps. I hope you will be
interested in them. Today we continue with the ninth part (September), the
third and fourth stamp
from
Romania.
If you have any interesting covers or other material to
enrich this site, please let me know.
Gunter
Volleyball stamps 14 and 15 of this presentation come from Romania. After the worldwide very first issue in 1945 this country issued another two Volleyball stamps ten years later, on June 17th, 1955. These stamps were issued to conmemorate the 4th Women’s & Men’s European Volleyball Championships held in Bucharest, capital of Romania. The value of 55 Bani shows an attack / blocking scene featuring male players, and the higher value of 1 Lei with 75 Bani is dedicated to a female player serving the ball. The perforation of both stamps is comb perforation14, they have watermark number 10 and one million copies were printed in photogravure.
watermark 10
Maximum card, cancelled on the first day of issue in Bacau, which is is the main city in Bacău County, with an estimated population of 210,469. Maybe it was one of the places were the Championships were organized.
The cover was
postally used, and our Volleyball stamp was affixed on the reverse side.
It was sent from Orastie, Romania, to Düren in Germany, where it was
received on Nov 13, 1995. It was sent as a registered airmail cover and
the postage paid was 1.95 Lei.
It seems that the letter was sent from one familiy member (Rudolf Schmidt)
to another one (Edmund Schmidt).
This cover (and the following one)
were sent to me by Piet van den Berg from Holland:
Here you can see the usage of both stamps described in this month. The
cover was sent as registered cover on June 20, 1955, from one destination
in the city of Bucharest to another one. It must be a philatelically
influenced cover, since the postage used (Lei 2.30) to send it from one
place to another in the same city could not really be more than the first
cover shown on this page, which was sent at a later date from Romania to
Germany.
And here we have a really interesting item: This cover was sent from the Romanian Supreme Court to the city of Craiova on Feb 1, 1956. It arrived there two days later, on Feb 3, 1956 (the cancel reads 3.II.956). Surprisingly the Supreme Court had to frank his letters with real stamps, when in many countries these institutions are exempt of paying postage.
