New Light on the 1921-22 Stamps of Armenia: Essayan and Khatchaturian?

I have blogged frequently about the first two pictorial issues of Soviet Armenia, their designer Sarkis Khatchaturian and their printer Vahan Essayan. We already know that Khatchaturian went to Constantinople in 1921  to discuss the new stamps he had designed. He was working for a government which had no money and instead he was provided with sample stamps, the so-called First Star issue, which he was authorised to sell and thereby - I think - fund his trip. From the following letter, it seems this plan did not work out as intended. Khatchaturian is using Essayan's notepaper to provide a Poste Restante address (hence the French endorsement "pour ..." at the top left of the sheet). He is writing about a previous letter asking for financial help from Dr Souren Hovhannisian (who may be living in Egypt) either directly or through an intermediary. The writer's wife is willing to travel to collect funds.

My guess is that Khatchadourian is approaching family or art world contacts for help. He was already a significant figure in the Armenian art world, and today the National Gallery of Armenia holds many of his works.

I am grateful to Haik Nazarian and Stefan Berger for tackling the translation and interpretation of this letter.

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Armenia First Yessayan Used Without Overprints

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The series of Armenian stamps known as "First Yessayan" were only issued in 1922 - 23 with overprints. However, since the overprints were all applied with single handstamps or in manuscript, it is inevitable that some stamps got missed. One should expect to find the occasional used stamp without an overprint.

In addition, both the Gibbons catalogue (following Tchilingirian and Ashford) and the Michel catalogue (following Zakiyan and Saltykov) list deliberate use of two values without surcharge.

Gibbons says that the 250 rouble perforated stamp was used without Manuscript surcharge " 1 k" ( in red or violet) at three post offices in March - May 1923. It lists those post offices as Delizhan, Karaklis and Keshikend.

Above are three used examples of the 250 r perforated stamp. Stefan Berger has studied all three of them with his microscope, telescope and goodness knows what else and can find no visible trace of a surcharge. The third stamp above has a readable ALEXANDROPOL cancel and I think the other two are also with Alexadropol cancels - the similarities are obvious. The first stamp in the row has an Agathon Faberge acquisition note from 1927, the second a MAISON ROMEKO mark. All three seem genuine in all respects to me and to Stefan Berger. So it looks like that at Alexandropol they also used this stamp without surcharge and probably deliberately since here we have three examples, not just a random one from a missed surcharge.

Michel says that the 25 rouble ( unspecified whether perforated or imperforate or both) which was later surcharged as a 4 kopeck stamp was also issued unsurcharged for use as a 1500 rouble stamp in the period January - May 1922. [This paragraph rewritten on the basis of a Comment from Alexander Epstein ] 

Anyway, the 25 rouble shown above with ERIVAN cancel of November 1922 does not appear to have any regular 4 kop surcharge. However, and just to complicate matters, there is a small violet ink mark under the day of the date line in the cancellation. This could either be randon or it could be a squiggle representing a number "4". Maybe this is a stamp from which the regular surcharge was accidentally omitted and a clerk made a manuscript correction. In the absence of other examples, who knows? All that is clear is that this stamp also lacks a regular surcharge. 

Armenia: First Yessayan set 1922 - Forged Overprints

Most forged overprints on First Yessayan stamps are easy to detect: either they are on forged basic stamps or the overprints are very different from the genuine ones. Of course, there is still a good market for these forgeries on ebay and all over the world there are people who have paid fifty dollars for a stamp I would sell them for fifty cents.

But there are also serious forgeries which always use genuine basic stamps and where the overprint handstamps have been made by forgers who have seen the genuine item.For example, there is a good forgery of the "50k" in black on 25 000 Ararat, imperforate in blue, which copies the fact that the overprint is normally centrally placed at the base of the stamp. Here it is:

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And now here is the genuine overprint:

There are numerous differences which you can see if you examine from left to right. Look at the shape of the "0" for example. In addition, and not so clear from my scans, is the fact that the ink is wrong on the forgery: it is a paler blue-black or grey-black. But the genuine overprint is always in a fairly intense black, not diluted.This is the difference I look for first and the left to right examination then confirms it.

And now here is a multiple with the genuine overprint, which will become relevant in a moment:

If you look at the bottom right stamp in this block you will see that because of the way the handstamp has been held on that occasion, the "k" has not printed properly. This is useful to see because here is a single used copy from ALEXANDROPOL 3 2 23 showing the same failure of the "k" to print properly. But by using the mint multiple for reference, we can be sure that this overprint is genuine, as one would expect from the genuine Alexandropol cancel. You can also see how intense is the black ink of the overprint compared to the ink of the cancelllation:

The stamps on this Blog are for sale as one group for 500 €uro

The block of six comes with a Stefan Berger Opinion

Armenia First Yessayan 1922 Pictorials

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On his website, www.stampsofarmenia.com, Stefan Berger recently posted a piece about the First Yessayan pictorial stamps of Armenia: http://stampsofarmenia.com/?p=1432

This made me look at my own holdings. Recently, I added a dozen examples of stamps printed on both sides of the paper - these were in the Peter Ashford collection. I was not very interested in them. But when I scanned them, I noticed a surprising feature: all the stamps printed on both sides are from very early states of the lithographic printing plate. You can see this if you enlarge the image above - the Both Sides stamps are on the left. The designs are sharp and clean.

The stamps are on thin ungummed paper. There are two possibilities: these stamps are Makulatur produced by Yessayan for the stamp trade; or they are Trial prints which economise on paper by using both sides.

Armenia 1922 - 1923 Postal Use of First and Second Yessayan

Evidence of private use of postal services in Armenia during the complete six year  period 1918 - 1923 is extremely scarce.

Mail in a few categories can be found as follows:

- Mail Abroad (mostly to the USA) during 1920 when the British facilitated its transmission
- As a sub-category, Philatelic mail to Tiflis sent during 1920 and notably by Souren Serebrakian
- Mail Abroad ( again mostly to the USA) during 1922 - 23
- Money Transfer Forms sending money internally or within Transcaucasia 1922 - 23

Peter Ashford's collection, about which I recently Blogged, also included a few examples of a further category:

- Internal private mail during 1922 - 23

His material comprised a few large fragments of covers or nearly-complete covers from the so-called "Law Courts Hoard" which was available to Ashford (and Tchilingirian) back in the 1950s and which appears to have been free of the kind of "improvements" made to more recently released archive material which started out as stampless, official letters but  to which stamps have been added in the recent past.

Ashford's material shows private individuals writing to the Courts ("People's Courts" on all the addresses). One puzzle concerns the status of the so-called "Second Yessayan" stamps - the slate and red stamps. These were supposedly Famine Relief stamps, issued around the same period as those in Azerbaijan and Georgia. As such, one expects to find them used in conjunction with "regular" adhesives as evidence of payment of a Charity supplement, as on this cover:

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This Registered cover started life in DZHELAL OGLY and is cancelled 22 2 23 on the front and 24 2 23 and 25 2 23 on the reverse. It was addressed to a People's Court in Alexandropol and a receiver cancel was applied ALEXANDROPOL 26 2 23. The letter was forwarded to Yerevan and got there though the dates on the two strikes of an ERIVAN cancel are not legible. The franking is provided by two copies of First Yessayan 50 perforated surcharged "5" together with Second Yessayan 2000  surcharged "5" . So one could suppose that the Tariff was 10 gold kopecks and the Charity surcharge 50% of that, 5 gold kopecks. 

However, it is possible to find Second Yessayan stamps used alone, as on this nice and nearly complete cover:

This Registered cover is locally sent within Karaklis, again to a People's Court. The cancellation on the front is date readable as KARAKLIS ERIVAN 8 7 22. Franking is provided by a single copy of the Second Yessayan 500 surcharged "3". Now, either the full (local?) Tariff was 3 kopecks and this stamp is used as a regular adhesive not a Charity stamp or - possibly - the Tariff was (say ) 2 kopecks and the Charity contribution 1 kopeck. In the absence of either a 2 kopeck First Yessayan or a 1 kopeck Second Yessayan, the postal clerk could then have decided to show the total paid by means of this one stamp. Does anyone have a better idea?

Ashford's material also included this third item which has no Second Yessayan adhesive. Sent just one month after the first cover I illustrated, it seems we get confirmation of a 10 kopeck Tariff. Sent Registered from KAMARLYU ERIVAN  29 3 23 it has no arrival marks (I am told that it is addressed locally to the Kamarlyu Court - the word in the top line is Kamarlinkskomu). It is possible that something has been left behind when this cover was cut from the archive book - the fragment is very reduced. But even so, one might expect to see at least a small part  of a receiver cancel to one side:

Peter Ashford collection 6: Armenia First Yessayan, Mount Ararat

Serious collectors of Armenia know that one way to test whether the stamp shown above is genuine - from the Yessayan printings in Constantinople - is to look for a dot or a dash above the top frame line, two thirds along from the left. Stefan Berger has written about this on his website

www. stampsofarmenia.com 

Sometimes I have been asked, Is the dot or dash always there?

This large block is interesting because it is from the early printings in milky-blue. Multiples of later printings in a darker blue and with some wear to the lithographic plate can be found with the "50k" overprint in black, but multiples from this early state are rare. So I looked at this one with interest.

There is always a dot or dot + dash but sometimes it is almost invisible. Click on the Image below to see it magnified - you can easily see the amount of variation:

In the past, I have done work to establish transfer groups. Usually it is quite easy. But on this part sheet, I cannot see what the transfer group may have been ... maybe I am missing something

The Transcaucasia Collection of Peter Ashford, 1

The Transcaucasia collection of the late Peter Ashford (P.T.Ashford,  1925 - 2010) was recently sold at auction in England. It was not a very large or very impressive collection, but it had been assembled over 50 years - beginning in the 1950s - and did include many items of interest.

Ashford is best known as the author of several important philatelic works: on Batum, Georgia, the Transcaucasian Railway, the cancellations used in Transcaucasia during the Imperial period, and in collaboration with Tchilingirian, a pioneering work on the stamps of independent Armenia. Many of these works date back to the 1950s and Ashford's collection contained a great deal of material used in writing the books.

I will publish some examples of material in the collection in my next few Blogs, concentrating on items which  which I have not seen illustrated elsewhere or which are interesting and unusual.

In Part Four of The Postage Stamps of Armenia (published 1960) Tchilingirian and Ashford (T & A) discuss the Soviet Pictorial issues of 1920 - 1923. For the First Yessayan pictorials they list "Artist's Proofs" and describe them as follows:

imperforate, on same paper as the issued stamps, except the 5,000 r., which is on a toned paper  looking brown ... Usually without gum, although a few values are exceptionally met with gum. A few sheets of each value were printed in varying shades of grey-black to black for presentation to designer S.Khachaturian, and were later split up by him in smaller blocks or singles, and disposed of on the market (page 194)

This story is consistent with the story Christopher Zakiyan tells about another issue, the First Star Set of 1921. As I noted in a previous Blog about that issue, the new Soviet government of Armenia in effect funded a trip by Khachaturian to Constantinople by supplying him with a small quantity of First Star overprints which he was allowed to sell there. Giving him some Proofs to sell as a way of paying for his more important work and foreign travels during the preparation of the First Yessayan set must have been an economical choice for the new Soviet Armenian government which had very little money to spend on anything. (As an aside, after 1991 the new Armenian government appears to have distributed New Issues via its new Embassies as a way of raising funds in local currency).

Though T&A report "a few sheets of each value", these Artist's Proofs seem to be rarer than that description suggests; I don't think I have seen them before I acquired this group - not a complete set - in the Ashford collection. Click on the Image to magnify:

  

Armenia 1921 First Yesssayan Pictorial Stamps

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This page from the collection of the late Stephen Hornby nicely illustrates the two Plates made for the 15 000 rouble value of the First Yessayan / Essayan pictorials, lithographed in Constantinople  at the V.M. Yessayan Printing Works for the new government of Soviet Armenia. 

Though this value was never issued - perhaps because it showed a church - Yessayan did not know this when he was printing the stamps. The fact that he made a new Plate to replace an unsatisfactory first Plate shows simply that he took this contract seriously and wanted to produce good work.

We know that the designer of these stamps, Sarkis Khachaturian, visited Constantinople in 1921 as a representative of the Armenian government (see my Blog about 1921  First Star overprints). We do not know how long he stayed and we do not know if he involved himself in the production of the stamps. But if he stayed long enough, he could certainly have got involved in the production and taken responsibility for redesigning this stamp.

Armenia: Turning Base Metal into Gold

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This is what happens when you buy Armenia without looking carefully!

At a show, I bought a small batch of used First Yessayan stamps. I checked the overprints and the cancellations on the stamps and they all looked OK. So I bought the stamps.

Later, when I looked more closely, I realised that several of the stamps overlapped on pieces, too many for coincidence. In addition, the brown paper on which they were stuck did not look right - it was old but not a type I had seen for 1920s Armenia. Some single stamps on this brown paper also did not look quite right.

So I scanned them all and this immediately showed that in all cases the parts of the cancellations on the brown paper were faked - they were drawn in by hand.

So why would you stick genuine stamps on bits of paper and fake a cancellation? My guess meant that I had to soak the stamps off the paper to find out.

The answer is shown on the right hand illustrations: the overlapping allowed someone to hide damaged stamps. See the top two rows on the right.

Using a paper backing also disguised damage and repair work on the two single stamps at the bottom.

Bottom right, the "3" on 20 000, the stamp was badly thinned and torn but this was hidden by backing it with a piece of sheet margin from some Imperial Russian sheet with lozenges and then putting the stamp onto the brown backing.

The stamp bottom left also revealed some labour-intensive work: at the top you can see that the perforations are not quite aligned. This is because the whole top right corner has been inserted from another stamp to repair damage to the main stamp.

Buyer beware!