Hello friends, I've been working on a stamps/history series for a while, I thought I'd publish the first installment now as a respite from today's terrible news.
The first postage stamp was issued in 1840 in Great Britain. The example was soon widely followed, so much so that within about 20 years, the issuance of postage stamps had come to be widely regarded as an incident of sovereignty, and a nation's history can be traced through these little glue-backed pieces of paper.
Image 1: Postage stamps of the Hungarian monarchy.
Hungary provides an example. Before 1867, Hungary had been essentially a large province of the Austrian empire. As such, Hungary simply used stamps of Austria, which used the German language.
By 1867, nationalistic agitation in Hungary, combined with the defeat of Austria by Prussia in the war of 1866, produced a constitutional revolution which resulted in the Austrian Empire being transformed into the Austria-Hungary dual monarchy, with Hungary becoming co-equal under the joint sovereign, Franz Josef.
From 1867 to 1871, both parts of the monarchy used the same postage stamps, but to avoid the question of which language to use, the stamps used none, just a statement of value and the emperor's effigy in profile.
Part of the language problem was that Hungary (Ungarn in German) was an exonym, the endonym was never quite settled, but following 1867, it was Magyar Királyság, "Kingdom of Hungary".
Image 1 shows four stamps of the Kingdom of Hungary, each bearing the legend Magyar Kir. Posta, short for Magyar Király Posta, Hungarian Royal Post. Top left is a red 1913 semi-postal stamp which, although valid for postal purposes, was sold at a premium to benefit a charitable cause, in this case, for flood relief.
The orange stamp at top right is classic Hungarian design first issued in 1900, embodying patriotic symbols, specifically the Turul a mythical bird linked to Magyar history, shown over the Holy Crown of Hungary, also known as the crown of St. Stephen. This particular stamp has an excellent postmark, showing it was used postally on February 24, 1900, apparently in Budapest. Note the cancellation mark replicates a simpler version of the Royal Crown.
The two toned blue stamp at lower left features the massive Gothic-revival style Parliament Building, completed in 1896 in Budapest along the shore of the Danube. This particular stamp was first issued in 1916, and the example shown here was postmarked in Szeged, probably about that same time.
The rose-colored stamp at lower left shows the monarch is Carl IV (1887-1922), who succeed to the thrones of Austria and Hungary in 1916, following the death of his long-reigning great-uncle, Franz Josef. Carl is shown wearing the crown of St. Stephen, which was also shown on the orange stamp just above. The stamp shown here was postmarked on December 12, 1918, after the monarchy's fall, but too soon for the replacement government to have overprinted the stamp, or changed the form of the postmarks used by the postal clerks, which in this case at least, continued to display the royal crown.
War's end, revolution, and occupation
World War I was a disaster for Hungary. Under the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary's territory and population were reduced to about 1/3 of what they had been pre-war. The main successor states were the newly created Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (then known as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), and a much-expanded Romania.
Image 2: Successor state use of Hungarian issues.
This was reflected in the stamps. Image 2 shows on the left, a stamp issued by the Croatia, ("SHS" stands for Serbs Croats Slovenes" in Croatian, with the name of the new country, Hrvatsaka (Croatia) overprinting Magyr Kir. Posta (Hungarian Royal Post), and the crown of St. Stephen defaced. Image 2 right stamp shows an overprint of the newly formed Czechoslovakian post office. It's likely that this stamp came from stock in the post offices within Slovakia.
Rapid regime changes
Hungary went through rapid regime changes in the 1918-1919 period. Image 3 shows a stamp of the 1918 royal issue, overprinted with Köztársaság, "republic" in Magyar. Two stamps to the left is a stamp overprinted with Tanácsköztársaság, "Soviet republic", representing a short-lived Communist regime which controlled central Hungary during part of 1919.
Image 3: Hungarian stamps, post-war period.
The far right stamp of Image 3 shows again a Soviet Republic overprinted stamp, but with an interesting cancellation mark, still bearing the royal crown. Postal emblems could not be updated fast enough to follow the changing of the regimes.
Forgeries abound
Various armies marched through Hungary in the years just after the war, and each one seemed to have its own contingent of philatelists. When this or that army would occupy a territory, the stamp collecting division thereof would head down to the local post office and run off a bunch of overprints on the former stamps of the Royal Hungarian Post. These became known as the "occupation issues", and there were about 11 of them.
Image 2 center stamp, the large orange-brown stamp with crude perforations, is from the "Debrecen II", issue, which is unique among the 17 occupation issues in that that it was a complete new design. The Debrecan II issue was nevertheless overprinted with the logo of the Romanian occupying forces. The entire Debrecan II issue seems to have been prepared simply to make money from stamp collectors; there are a few known postal covers, but these appear to have been done purely for philatelic purposes.
Collector demand for the occupation overprints issues far exceeded the supply, so that huge numbers of forgeries came to be made, it being much easier to forge an overprint than an entire stamp. As a result, pretty much every stamp of these issues that one sees on Ebay for example is going to be a forgery. A surprising amount of work has been done to identify the genuine from the false issues, for example x-ray spectroscopy (.PDF)
The Dark Side of Philately
Philately, the fancy word for stamp collecting, has always attracted forgers and imitators, some of them quite good, and there was even a time when forgery, known as reprints, was considered an acceptable practice.
There is a bizarre tale of the good/bad Occupation Issue stamp expertizer, Henry Pape. (A "stamp expertizer" is a person who certifies stamps as genuine, usually by a mark or stamp placed on the reverse).
Pape worked for a Hungarian stamp dealer, and was responsible for identifying forged from genuine overprints on the occupation issues. When he found a genuine stamp, Pape would stamp the back with his name "PAPE".
Unfortunately, Pape gave in to the Dark Side of the Philatelic Force and figured out that it was more lucrative to identify forgeries as genuine, place his stamp on them certifying the same, and sell them to unsuspecting collectors, thus giving rise to (link):
The "Good Pape" mark, indicating a genuine stamp, is clean-cut and neat with all letters very clear ... The "Bad Pape" marks may appear on both counterfeit and genuine stamps. They have either broken letters or smearing or both. They are believed to have been made with rubber stamps ...
Next in part 2: Stabilization, irredentism, fascism, defeat, inflation, and communism -- all in stamps!