Balkan Postal History

[rayb]

... or Entries From a Postal Historian's Casebook.

Looking through some cancels in my Bosnian collection. Here is a postmark from 1910 in the period of Austrian annexation.

Pretty straightforward? A TPO cancel from Berlin, route no. 304, to somewhere in Bosnia - unfortunately somewhere not revealed due to the absence of a large chunk of the cancel. Never mind; a quick Google of Berlin TPO 304 or something similar should identify the other end of the line.

Nothing! And so some chill thoughts begin to grip the Postal Historian's innards:
If this cancel is German why is it in a Hungarian format and
If this started in Berlin going TO Bosnia why is it on a Bosnian stamp?

Start reading the Prirucnik at page one; and on page 52 lies the answer. Go back to the stamp and look at the smudgy marks just before the B of Berlin. They are the underinked remainder of the letters DO. Doberlin is the Hungarian attempt at the Bosnian name Dobrljin. And here is a modern picture of its Inernational Intercity Rail Link.  



The cancel is a TPO from Doberlin to Zagrab (i.e. Zagreb). Now we are looking for it, we can see the final B of Zagrab in the bottom right corner.

Of the 20 TPO services in Bosnia only three went outside the country - Brod to Gruz (a suburb of Dubrovnik), Brod to Szabatka/Nagy Kanizsa/Budapest and the line to Zagreb from little tiny Dobrljin. Why there, of all places? Because it was right on the border with Hungarian Croatia. Hence the Hungarian format and the route no. 304 which is more indicative of the number of routes in Hungary than in Bosnia!

[rayb]

Now for something to make me look really stupid:



I've had this Turkish stamp in my collection for a while. The overprint on the stamp dates it to later than Jan 1869. Until 1878 Bosnia was part of the Ottoman Empire, and so there was a period of about 9 years when it could have been cancelled in Bihac in Bosnia. I bought it from a dealer (in my opinion a reliable one) as precisely that.

I know what you are all saying - "Hang on a minute! The actual placename on the cancel consists of a tiny thick black squiggle about two thirds of the way up the left margin of the stamp!! What can you get from that?"

Well, I recently borrowed a copy of Coles/Walker Postal Cancellations of the Ottoman Empire and merrily set out to prove it was a Bihac cancel.

Here is the illustration




Disaster! Nothing like it! So now to check all the cancelations and find out where it is really from. Sounds like a very long job, but in fact not, because the TRIPLE circle is quite scarce. And having checked all the triple circles - nothing!

Eventually I decide to give up and pick up the page. As I pick it up it is upside down.



And there it is. The exact squiggle for the end of Bihac. Check against all the other inversions of triple circles. Nothing even close. Bihac it is. For 4 years I have been displaying the irrelevant and valueless stamp the right way up and the all important cancel upside down.

[rayb]

Also amongst the Bosnian postmarks is this:



Han Comp. Vitez.
Vitez is a small town dead in the centre of Bosnia. But why Han Comp.?
Comp. is not too difficult - bear in mind that ALL Bosnian post offices under the Austro-Hungarian occupation and, as in this case of 1911, annexation were operated by the army. Comp. indicates Company in the military sense; the normal Serbo Croat word would be Kompanija with a K, but this is Bosnia!

But what about Han? A quick Google gives a lot of information about Chewbacca's co-pilot, but not a lot else. Serbo Croat dictionaries - nothing.

But remember that until thirty years previously Bosnia had been under Ottoman rule. A brief investigation of Turkish throws up a 'lodging house' or more modernly 'motel'. Military organizations in 1911 were unlikely to have a company motel, but they were very likely to have a Company Barracks - and I suspect this is what is implied by this cancel.

[rayb]

With all the other Bosnian cancels having military (milit. post) references on them these two stand out, since they don't!

Geld-Anweisung
They are cancels of the Money Order desk - in this case at Sarajevo.

[rayb]

Two grubby used copies of the 1916 Bosnian postage due. Why give them album room when you could get a beautiful pristine mint copy for next to nothing?

Because both of them are cancelled in Serbia (respectively 'Serbien' and 'Belgrade') The Central Powers military used the plentifully available Bosnian postage dues when they moved into Serbia and also (overprinted in the local currency) into parts of Northern Italy (this one is obviously philatelic!)



In fact they also took some of the earlier (1904) Bosnian postage dues with them to the Baltic, but didn't get round to using them. They were captured at the end of the war in the town of Stanislaviv and overprinted for use by the short-lived government of the Republic of the Western Ukraine. (Don't I have any used copies? I certainly do - and every one of them is a fake!)

[rayb]

Here's something to illustrate the point that sometimes it is more important to know the political history of an area than the philatelic history.

A 1921 cover from the Croatian island of Vis in the SHS. (The return address on the back states Jugoslavia, showing that the name was commonly used from the start of the SHS, even though it did not take that name till 1929.)

But what it says is Lissa in Dalmazia in the bottom segment and nothing at all in the top segment. What we have here is a common enough occurence in early SHS - a post office continuing to use the postal handstamps of the previous occupying power (in this case Austria), but with part of the 'enemy' postmark defaced/obliterated. The original would have had Vis at the top. Here is an example from 20 years previously:




But hang on a minute! The name scratched off is the CROAT name! Why was it that, rather than the 'foreign' Lissa which was removed?

Immediately (oh, alright - about two hours later ) the answer struck me. Although essentially the SHS came into being in Dec 1918, its precise borders were not settled for a considerable time, as negotiations between the Allied Governments continued.

In particular, the Italians, in secret negotiations in London in 1915 before they came into the war, had as an inducement been promised most of the Dalmatian Coast, including no doubt the island of Vis, if the war was won. So the Italians were expecting to get Vis/Lissa. They may well have had troops there. They had a strong population there, and that may very easily have included the Postmaster. So we can clearly see why and how it came about that it` was Vis, not Lissa, that was excised from the cancel.

Then late in 1920 the results of the Treaty of Rapallo were made public. The SHS, not Italy, got Vis. There is a strong but unofficial story that the Italians were offered Vis/Lissa or Lastovo/Lagosta and chose the latter as being more strategically useful to them than Vis, even though Vis had had a higher propotion of Italian residents.

So the SHS was left with Vis, and Vis, at least temporarily, was left with the old handstamp saying only Lissa!

[rayb]

Now to another example of the tensions and accomodations evident between the new SHS and its former occupationists:


We are, according to the cancel, in Nagy Becskerek (now called Zrenjanin, just to confuse the issue a little further) in the Serbian Vojvodina, formerly part of Hungary, in Feb 1920. Well actually, if we lived there we would know we were really in Veliki Beckerek - but noone in the Post Office has got round yet to replacing the old Hungarian cancel.

We want to send a postcard. The postcard rate is 15, and has been since June 1919. 15 what, I hear you ask. A good, and practically unanswerable question. Depending where you are, it could be 15 heller, 15 para, 15 filler or 15 vinar. Since in the new state they are theoretically at parity, and since Austrian and Hungarian inflation have not yet started to cloud the issue, it shouldn't matter too much. But since we are in Serbia we will say 15 para.

So I need 15 para postage to send my card. It already, being a postal stationery card, has 10 filler printed on it. Fortunately we have a 5 vinar adhesive stamp which we can stick on as well, to make the rate of 15.

I'm not too sure how we got hold of the stamp since we are about 500km from Ljubljana in Slovenia where they are produced. But it doesn't matter because in the SHS the stamps of any one area are valid for postage in any other SHS area.

But the same cannot be said for the 10 filler card. This is not SHS material, but left-overs from the previous occupation by Hungary. And yet it has passed through the SHS post without query or postage due.



 

[rayb]

9 months have passed. It is Nov 1920. (No, I can't read the underinked 0 either, but the postage rate for postcards, which here is clearly still 15 thingees, would have risen on 1st May 1921 to 20 para (paras became universal state currency on 1st Apr 1921).


We are still in Serbian Vojvodina, but have moved 50km down the road to Sremski Karlovci; again, old Hungarian cancels are still in use, using the Croat, not Serbian, name of Srijemski Karlovci.

This time I have an 8 filler Hungarian postal stationery card. And although the Hungarian arms and the Hungarian text, including the words Levelezo Lap (Postcard) have been scribbled out, the printed stamp, which is hidden below the rightmost stamp (yes, I have steamed the stamp enough to pull half of it back to check) is untouched.

But clearly the post office were not going to accept the 8 filler as part payment of postage, and insisted on the full payment being made in SHS stamps. This I presume represents a policy change towards the acceptance of Hungarian postal stationery, at least in the Vojvodina.

[rayb]

The Vojvodina, having a high proportion of ethnic Hungarians, was probably more sympathetic to the idea of letting people 'use up' their old Hungarian stationery, than was the case in other SHS areas where a much more 'them and us' attitude to Hungarians prevailed.

Certainly in the case of Croatia, from the very beginning of the SHS in 1918, any unused Hungarian postal stationery which fell into the hands of the postal authorities were very heavily treated to obliterate all signs of Hungary before they were released to the public.

A typical example - with a rather nice bunch of flowers to hide the Arms:

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A much less succesful example, where the overprints were in such weak ink that there had no power of obliteration at all!

[rayb]

In this case the desire to totally obliterate barely left enough space to write the address!

[rayb]

I am now getting well off the point, because these next examples have no connection with philately, never mind Postal History; but they follow on from what I have been saying.

This obliteration of place names and text which were 'enemy' stuff occured on commercial postcards as well as postal stationery. I occasionally pick them up if I see them going cheaply.



Hungarian town name Szabadka and text replaced with Serbian name Subotica. Card used Nov 1919.

[rayb]

At the end of WW2 the enemy were Italy who were trying to hang on to parts of the Dalmatian coast. Here a view card of the Postojna Caves has the Italian Grotte di Postuma replaced by the Slovenian Postojnska Jama.


Used in early 1947 in the Yugoslav Administered Area of Istria.

[rayb]

I would give a lot to know the precise date of this - beyond the obvious 1935 to 1941; but unfortunately when it was put through the cancelling machine it missed the dater.

The attempt here (rather unsuccessful) is to obliterate the Italian version of the description of the obverse, which includes mantion of Zara. Croats always refer to it as Zadar.

The granting of Zadar to Italy at the end of WW1had always been a sore point with the government of Yugoslavia. But why now?

In the absence of a precise date, all I can say is that when the Axis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941 one of the main launch-pads was Zadar. And that huge build up of troops there cannot have happened overnight. I suspect this card relates to a period of militarization of Zadar by the Axis Powers.

[rayb]

And now for something completely different. Here is a little cover that completely changed my view and understanding of the military history of 1919.


I always knew that those elements of the Serb army which escaped the Central Powers invasion in 1915 ended up in Southern Greece with the French Eastern Army, and that by 1918 the joint French-Serb forces had pushed their way up through Greece and Macedonia and then into Serbia.

I suppose I had a vague vision of the French still being around at the liberation of Belgrade; but thereafter, once the 1913 borders of Serbia had been re-established, I pretty much assumed that the French tucked the Serbs into bed, kissed them goodnight and tiptoed back to France during the night. The following day, of course, the Serbs woke up with a terrible hangover and rushed off to annexe the Vojvodina.

And yet here was a very simple cover - a message of greeting sent by a French soldier by military post to his girlfriend in Rouen. It was sent in Feb 1919 from Ujvidek - which is to say from Novi Sad, capital of the Vojvodina. They were there with the Serbs, helping and encouraging them in their attempts to move the Serbian border North.

[clif]

What a terrifically interesting thread! I am humbled and amazed by your brilliant research skills!!