Dashnak Armenia: A Small Reward for Looking Closely

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Tidying up my stock the other day, I came across these three stamps in a packet. I was about to add them to a section of common 5r Dashnak Armenian overprints when I realised they were not quite right. They are, in fact, overprinted centrally with a 3r handstamp and its accompanying monogram above. So that suggests they are “counter surcharges” – unofficial combinations of stamps and overprint done as a favour to a collector or dealer. For Dashnak Armenia, Michel does not list these counter surcharges but Gibbons does and so does Ceresa in his handbooks. Both are following the listings in Tchilingirian and Ashford’s books ( now over sixty years old).

But then I noticed something else. On all three stamps, you can find part of a “5r” overprint above and to one side of the 3r overprint. But you cannot find more than a trace of a 5r monogram. What is going on?

I think this is a case where a clerk may have made a genuine mistake and tried to correct it. So these are corrected surcharges, not counter surcharges. To avoid the mess of two monograms, he tilted the 5r handstamp so that the monogram does not print. But this also meant that the 5r does not print properly either. On the dark background, it’s not clear what has happened. Whatever has happened the reuslt is a mess and from a practical point of view, a failure.

All three stamps are from the same sheet – they are all off-centre in the same way. All were signed by Theodore Champion, a careful Paris dealer of the time, and all were later signed RJC [ Dr Ceresa’s first handstamp]. But Ceresa does not list this variety in his Armenia handbook. Perhaps he also put these stamps into a packet and forgot about them.

Where Can I Buy Genuine Dashnak Armenian Stamps of 1919 - 21?

Well, try

www.filateliapalvelu.com

where bidding closes on 1 December. There is a page for Armenia, most of the items from my stock, and separate pages for Azerbaijan and Georgia and, finally, a separate page for Transcaucasia as a whole.

Postal use of Dashnak Armenia stamps

The new Armenia listing in the Michel catalogue (see previous Blog post) gives separate prices for used stamps in the Dashnak period, but they are prices for CTO copies. A note simply indicates the scarcity of postally used material, and its rarity for anything used outside Erivan and Alexandropol.

There are two problems about postally used Armenian material: finding it and identifying it correctly. As for Danzig and other territories, if gum is washed off CTO stamps they often look very much like postally used stamps – especially where centrally placed cancels are applied. Worse, in some places dealers and collectors applied mint stamps singly to sheets of paper or blank envelopes and got them cancelled in bulk. But a single stamp when removed from its backing paper looks like a used stamp. This is true for all the Baltic countries after World War One and also for Armenia.

Philatelists do archive research and often find helpful information, as Christopher Zakiyan did for Armenia. But unanswered questions remain. In the Armenian case here are some of my thoughts and  speculations:

Between 1917 and 1921 postal activity was often disrupted and some Armenian post offices disappeared forever: those in the areas of eastern Anatolia taken by Turkey (all of the Kars district, notably). Alexandropol was occupied by Turkey for a period. Conflict with Georgia disrupted the postal service. It wasn’t always possible to get the trains to run. Civil conflict, famine and disease were more or less permanent features of Armenian life.

Postal activity was modest. The practice which was standard at least until 1939 of soaking stamps off covers makes it seem even more modest than it was. In addition, a significant part of internal Armenian mail would have been stampless official correspondence of which little survives which has not been faked by the addition of genuine stamps cancelled with fake handstamps. But even those fakes provide useful information.

Erivan could not always maintain contact with other post offices. It did not always supply them with stamps so cash payments were accepted – this became official policy in the transitional year 1921 (Zakiyan’s research). Conversely, those post offices could not always get things into the postal network even if they were open and a clerk on duty.

But the post offices were always there and the best evidence for that is the rapid revival of the internal post in 1922 – 1923 where old Imperial cancellations suddenly re-appear on the new Soviet Armenian issues, sometimes very dirty and worn (BASARGECHAR a good example).

A significant part of franked mail in the Dashnak period was foreign mail destined for the Allied countries – the USA, France and Great Britain – who were providing some minimal support to the new Armenian republic and sometimes helped the mail along its way, as the British did in Batum. Those covers often had stamps soaked off and that is one reason that when I try to assemble examples of postally used stamps, it is the higher values which are more common. See the scans below. Tariffs during 1920 rose through rouble steps: 2 and 4 and 8 roubles. But mail abroad seems to have reduced and even stopped before the end of 1920 – postally used examples of rouble overprinted stamps are rare. There are only two examples on my scans (both of 1 rouble overprints).

Inland mail from Erivan or Alexandropol probably had a poor delivery and survival rate. In addition, though stamps may have gone into Armenian collections, they did not leave the country once Soviet control was established. This is probably why I can show so few kopeck value stamps which would have made up tariffs of 30 and 60 kopecks and 1 ruble 20.

The stamps on the scans are ones I think probably or certainly postally used, though I cannot tell whether they were originally on philatelic covers which (for example) Souren Serebrakian sent in quantity to his brother in Tiflis. In sorting the stamps which are shown, I have looked at such things as paper adhering to the back of the stamp, careless cutting of imperforate stamps and even hand tearing, smudged postmarks which don’t look like the usual CTO. In among all the Erivan and some Alexandropol cancels, you will see a couple of manuscript cancels and just one identifiable as from another town, Karaklis, flagged up on a 3 rouble 50 kop imperforate.

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Dashnak Armenian Stamps: Relative Values

Stefan Berger has just published a short piece on his www.stampsofarmenia.com website about the relative values of Dashnak Armenian stamps. He takes as an example the framed Z overprints of 1920. Correctly in my view, he makes three claims:

- small framed Z overpints are much scarcer than medium or large size framed Z
- black overprints are more common than violet ones, except on one or two values (he lists the 5 rouble imperforate)
- some low value perforated stamps are scarce with these overprints, in any size or colour. He instances the 2 kopeck perforated with black overprint.

Of course, I immediately thought that I had just offered a 2 kopeck perforated with large framed Z in black in the last www.filateliapalvelu.com auction. It had a Stefan Berger Opinion included. I described it as a "scarce value with this overprint" - an understatement, of course, so as not to exaggerate. It sold for 20 euro, the start price, with just one bidder. That's basically giving it away - and that's because very, very few people know what Stefan Berger and I know: it's actually quite a rare stamp.

The real problem is this: there is a very big market in Armenian stamps, mostly on ebay and other sites, dominated by sellers who don't care what they sell and buyers who don't care what they buy. There just aren't many serious collectors of Armenian stamps, just as there are only a few serious collectors of Armenian postal history a couple of whom exhibit at International shows (Nagapetiants, Sarkissian)

Maybe 20 year ago now, I was asked by an Armenian dealer to supply him with stamps. He sold album pages, very nicely produced, aimed at the Armenian "Heritage Collector" market. He explained to me that it didn't matter if the stamps were genuine or forged, his people weren't worried about that. As long as the stamps cost less than the album pages, they would be happy. They would have something to show their families and friends.

That Heritage Collector market has now shifted onto the Internet where it combines with the market of one-of-each collectors or filling-an-album collectors who aren't much worried about rarity or authenticity but who just want some cheap stamps. And in the case of Armenia, there are so many forgeries around, sure, you can have as many cheap stamps as you want.

Matters are not helped by the fact that the catalogues are often useless. Yvert traditonally used forged stamps as the basis of all its illustrations, and now has them in colour; the supposedly specialist Artar catalogue uses a mix of genuine and forged material in its illustrations. Michel has got the structure right but relative prices wildly wrong. Only Stanley Gibbons gets its reasonably right, basing itself on the old Tchilingirian and Ashford listings. (I haven't seen Liapine; Ceresa's pricings are unfortunately spread out over several A4 handbooks but are no longer valid in any case).

It's a bit depressing. If I can only get 20 €uro for a rare stamp with a good certificate (for which I have paid), I may as well give up and start selling forged Armenian stamps on ebay.

 

One in a thousand? One in ten thousand? One in a hundred thousand?

From very early on in the postage stamp era, there have been stamp issues - often perfectly genuine ones - where the proportion of stamps printed actually used postally is very low. The first 1866 issue of Honduras is a good example. In such cases, catalogues often advise, Beware of Forged Cancellations! But catalogue prices rarely reflect the full reality of postally used scarcity.

An extreme example is provided by the 1919 issue for the Northern Army, # 15 - 19 in Michel, which gives a total printing figure of 3 000 000 stamps for the five values. This figure may well be correct: the Northern Army issue shows little or no sign of being aimed at the philatelic market. The stamps are the worst designed ever, all five of them boring. Proofs, colour trials, errors and varieties are almost non-existent. It may be that the Northern Army really hoped they would need these stamps for post offices in the areas they occupied and optimistically ordered three million.

In the event, these stamps were briefly placed on sale at post offices and a few postally used copies are known on cover and card. Alexander Epstein has chronicled them. Add them all up, and maybe you have twenty postally used stamps.

Rather more stamps are known cancelled to order, either as sheets or on covers. But even including these, it seems to me doubtful that the total adds up to more than ten thousand. The remainder are all mint stamps. But Michel prices mint and used at the same prices. That's absurd.

Another extreme example, and more interesting, is provided by the stamps of Dashnak Armenia. In 1919 - 20 the Dashnaks did attempt to run a postal service in a tiny country ravaged by war, famine and disease, Anyone who could was leaving, taking with them postage stamps which they had exchanged for Armenian currency worthless in the outside world.

As a result, and to this day, mint stamps or CTO stamps massively outnumber postally used ones. How massively? I have handled many thousands of Dashnak stamps in the past twenty-plus years. I doubt that one in a thousand stamps I have seen is postally used, probably more like one in ten thousand. In addition, only a small number of values are seen postally used: the 60k on 1 kopeck first issue, the 10/7 kopeck with framed Z, the 1 rouble, 3 rouble 50 and 5 rouble with framed or unframed Z ... maybe twenty or thirty different types. If you add in the over the counter philatelic productions which Souren Serebrakian used on postcards to his brother in Tiflis, you double or treble that number.

Interestingly, no one to my knowledge has tried to make a full list of stamps known postally used. Someone should do it!

Armenia 1920 Dashnak overprints: an important statistic

It would be wonderful to discover a genuine narrative of day-to-day activity in Erivan post office during 1920.

My guess is that it was essentially a philatelic bureau and that over 90% of all stamps overprinted in the post office were sold to people about to leave Armenia who cashed in their (worthless) Armenian banknotes against postage stamps which in Constantinople, Paris or Berlin could be exchanged for hard currency. I guess there were also a few dealers and speculators who came from Tiflis or Batum or Baku, shopped and left. There should have been no problem paying the salaries of the post office clerks.

In the second half of 1920, the post office began surcharging stamps previously overprinted with framed or unframed Z, at a rate which increased the face value of the stamps by a minimum of 100 times for kopeck values ( 1 kopeck stamps surcharged 1 rouble and so on) and a minimum of 10 times for rouble stamps (10 rouble becoming 100 roubles). This made financial sense but the sensible move came rather late.

Customers at the philatelic counter had already bought most of the stamps originally overprinted with framed Z handstamps, especially the bargain price low values which even when they were overprinted had no postal usefulness - tariffs were already at a minimum of 60 kopecks.

More sheets of the stamps with unframed Zs, overprinted later than the framed Zs, remained.

In the Michel catalogue, combined surcharges on framed Z stamps are listed as Michel 86 - 101; combined surcharges on unframed Z stamps then follow as 102 - 118. My 2006 Michel makes no distinction in the pricing - the stamps are given the same values simply according to the face values of the stamps.

This is a mistake; the framed Z stamps are much, much scarcer. How much scarcer?

Last year I bought Peter Ashford's collection of Combined Surcharges - that's the Ashford of Tchilingirian and Ashford. Today I was looking at the collection and counted 310 stamps. Of those just 32 had framed Z overprints - say 10%. Since Ashford would have been looking to represent as many types as possible, 10 % almost certainly over estimates the proportion of framed Zs among Combined Surcharges. In addition, Combined Surcharges on Imperial kopeck value stamps with a face value below 15 kopecks are extremely rare - there were no longer the basic stamps in stock to use for the second surcharge. It is only when you get to 25, 35 and 50 kopecks that you begin to see framed Zs. Here, for example, is Ashford's page of 35 kopeck stamps surcharged 10 roubles. The five stamps in the top row have framed Zs (Ashford classifies them as E1b, E1b, E4, E6, E6), the rest of the page shows examples of unframed Zs.

Expertising Handstamped Overprints

Because they are handstamped, handstamped overprints are infinitely variable: the way the clerk inks the handstamp can vary infinitely (pressure, angle etc) and the way he or she applies it to the stamp can also vary infinitely.

That causes problems for the would-be Expertiser.

My own strategy is to start with the things which are not infinitely variable.

(1) The Handstamp. What is the genuine handstamp made of? Wood, metal or rubber? If you can work this out, you can also work out what a genuine strike of the handstamp is likely to look like. Quite often, forgers will use the wrong material to make their own handstamps - say, rubber instead of wood. And it is then possible to say that something is a Forgery because you can see that it is made from a rubber handstamp not a wooden one. You don't have to look more closely.

(2) The Ink Pad. In general, for any one handstamp only one or a few ink pads will be used by the post office clerk. If they are re-inked, they will be re-inked from a limited supply of bottles. Forgers producing small batches are likely to use just one ink pad and one bottle - and, in many cases, it is immediately recognisable that the ink they have bought from the local shop is just plain WRONG. You don't have to look more closely.

(3) The Basic Stamp. Remarkably often, forgers use the wrong basic stamp - maybe a forgery or a reprint or a later printing of a stamp which was used to make the original overprints. If the overprint can be dated to 1918 and the stamp was not printed in such-and-such a shade until 1920, then you know you a re looking at a forgery if the stamp is the 1920 version.

Starting this way reduces the number of stamps you have to look at closely - most Forgeries can be dismissed at a glance.

The real art needed to assess the few that can't is to find features of the genuine handstamp which tend to show however the clerk inks the handstamp and however he or she applies it. For this purpose, it is really helpful to have a large multiple showing the same overprint. For example only, suppose that the handstamp is the number and value  "100 r". You may find that however much the strikes differ, the gap between the "1" and the "0" and the gap between the "0" and the second "0" remains the same - when you allow for the slight differences between heavily inked and lightly inked strikes. You may also find curious things like this: maybe a tiny part of the second "0" almost never seems to print whatever the way the handstamp is struck. There is clearly some small defect in the handstamp - an area which is a millimetre below the level of the rest of the handstamp and which only fills up and shows when the handstamp is very heavily inked or struck.

And so it goes ... For the "100 r" Armenain Dashnak overprint on Russian stamps, Stefan Berger tells me he uses a 16 Features Test for the most difficult cases....

Armenian Forgeries

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It's hard to get excited about forgeries of Dashnak Armenian stamps. They were produced on an industrial scale - and no doubt there is someone still producing them. You don't need more than kindergarten skills.

Many forgeries were probably produced by people who did not possess genuine examples and had only seen pictures. Some forgeries were produced by people copying forgeries which they may have thought to be genuine examples - for Dashnak overprints they may have put their trust in the illustrations of Yvert et Tellier, all of which are (or were - I last looked a few years ago) copied from forgeries.  Over the decades, Yvert probably did more harm to Armenian philately than any other catalogue. 

The forger who produced the small multiples shown above had almost certainly seen genuine stamps since he (it's normally he) has copied a feature you see on genuine sheets - the post office clerk testing out his (then it was always his) handstamp in the sheet margin. As forgeries, these are consequently Above Average.

The 10r on 25 kopeck imperforate forgery is interesting. This is a stamp which I think exists in genuine state, but it's rare - the 25 kop was not a common stamp imperforate and it would probably only have reached Armenia in the first Bolshevik period (end 1920 - beginning 1921) and would then have been used by Melik-Pachaev to produce scarce philatelic varieties in the second Dashnak period of 1921. 

Though basic stamps and Dashnak overprints are combined in a myriad of ways, many of the permutations the inspired work of dealers and speculators, there is one area where some kind of discipline was maintained. This is the case for high value overprints (50 rouble and 100 rouble) on rouble value basic stamps. The 50 r overprint was normally applied to the 1 rouble stamp and the 100 rouble overprint to the other high value stamps (3r 50, 5r, 7r, 10r). Though genuine 100r overprints can be found on the 1 rouble, 50 rouble overprints do not appear to exist on the higher value stamps. Some 5r stamps exist overprinted 25r - and then corrected to 100r. 

So it appears that either a ruling by the post office or the economics of the situation meant that no one got hold of surcharges below 100r on stamps above 1 rouble It's curious but seems to be true. 

But spaces for lower value surcharges on higher value stamps found their way into old French album pages and forgers obliged with stamps to fit. Or vice versa: the album pages were designed for the forgeries. Below I show an old album page, given to me at the Paris Salon d'Automne with spaces for 50 r surcharges on imperforate 3r50 and 5r stamps (#73, 74). And I also show a block of 50r on 5r forgeries from an old dealer's stock which I bought at auction many years ago in Paris's rue Druout stamp trade district. I think it's a chicken and egg situation: did the album page come first or the forgery?

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Armenia 1919 - 21 Dashnak overprinted stamps

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Armenia's 1919 - 21 Dashnak overprints are all made with single handstamps, the Z handstamps made of rubber and the rouble handstamps made of metal. Tens of thousands of stamps were overprinted, probably most of them sold to people emigrating. There was no point taking out Armenian currency - Armenia was in ruins, was not exporting anything and had no tourist trade - but stamps were a saleable commodity abroad. Domestic postal services were very restricted and outside Armenia some mail went to Georgia but beyond that almost nothing.

There are several types of ink used and these affect the look of the overprints. This is particularly the case for the metal rouble handstamps. 

Look at the top two block of six. Both have genuine overprints from the same handstamp, but one is made using a "dry" ink and the other with a "watery" (diluted) ink. The effect of the diluted ink is to eliminate the fine detail of the Monogram above the "10r" and to make the "0" in the "10r" appear more round. But if you put these overprints on top of each other, they match very well - the overall dimensions remain the same.

At the end of the Dashnak period, rouble surcharges were added to stocks of stamps with existing Z overprints. The bottom left block of 4 shows "10" added in black over a small Z in grey ink so the overall effect is not too bad. But on the right, I show a block of 4 where the Monogram above the "10r" has been obscured (Dr Ceresa suggests with a paper strip) so that the Z can still be seen. 

Importantly, the Monogram has not been removed from the 10r handstamp to create a new type: if you look at the stamp in position 1 in this block of 4, you can see traces of the Monogram below the Z. This effect is common on these stamps - though the stamps themselves are scarce or rare.

Armenia: Postally Used Dashnak Stamps 1919-21

Postally Used Dashnak Stamps? Mission Almost Impossible.

Over the past twenty years, I have handled thousands of Dashnak stamps - and maybe six commercial or philatelic covers and cards, which can only be obtained as expensive single item Lots in auction.

At one point, it occurred to me to look at my stamps and take out any that looked postally used as opposed to Cancelled to Order (Favour cancelled).

CTO stamps normally have neat, full cancels "socked on the nose" or they have neat quarter cancels. Only four places seem to have cancelled to order: Alexandropol, Erivan [ maybe 90% of the total], Elenovka and Katarsky Zavod (the copper mines at Giryusy). The last two places favour cancelled only a tiny number of stamps. Most CTO stamps will have gum but, of course, this can be washed off and sometimes is.

From my stocks, I picked out maybe thirty stamps. A few were on pieces and one had a violet Censor cachet across it. These I sold. The rest are shown above.

Given the Tariffs at this period, you would expect to find mainly rouble value stamps or stamps with rouble surcharges. However, early on there was a 60 kopeck tariff and a 1 rouble 20 tariff. Since there is no 60 kopeck Imperial stamp, then a 50 Kopeck + 10 kopeck would have been an efficient two stamp way of reaching 60 kopecks [ 25 + 35 is also possible but no other combination]. For 1 rouble 20, 1 rouble + 20 kopeck is one of two ways of obtaining that rate; the other is to use two 1 kopeck stamps with 60k Armenian overprints. [At Katarsky Zavod the local 1 r 20 overprint on 1 kopeck would have also served].

This reasoning leaves some puzzles in relation to the stamps shown above which include a 2 kopeck and 3 kopeck imperforate with unframed Z. These stamps could have been soaked from philatelic covers, like those sent by Souren Serebrakian to his brother in Tiflis. These are normally correctly franked, but with a variety of low value adhesives.

I also have some doubts about the 3r on 3 kopeck and 5r on 2 kopeck imperforate shown in the top row on the right. These have ERIVAN "k" cancellations which are associated with the speculative activity of Paul Melik - Pacher / Pachaev / Pachaian about which I have Blogged before. It's possible that these two stamps are also soaked from philatelic covers.

This perhaps shows that though they exist postally used Dashnak stamps are needles in haystacks or hen's teeth.