Russian Mail to Mont Athos before 1870

From early in the 19^th century, the Imperial Russian government was actively involved - financially and diplomatically - in expanding the Russian presence on Mont Athos. By 1912, the majority of monks on Athos were Russian though in 1913 the Imperial government sent gunboats to Athos to arrest and deport about 800 of the 2000 Russian monks. They were accused of heresy, tried in Odessa, and internally exiled. For every two or three monks there was probably one servant and many or most of those were Russian too.

The major developments in Russification took place after 1850 and at some point  a ROPiT postal agency was established on Athos. But any ingoing or outgoing mail before 1870 is very rarely seen and I cannot find on the internet any example of ROPiT postmarks for Mont Athos before the 1890s, though inward mail in the form of Money Letters is common from about 1875 onwards. It always has Odessa transits but only in the 1890s do Athos marks  appear and then only on occasional items which were sent outside bags sealed in Odessa.

In previous Blogs I have illustrated the use of Free Frank privilege to send mail from mainland Russia to Athos, always via Odessa. I can now illustrate an early item on which I would welcome comment. 

Sent in 1869 from Novgorod under a Free Frank seal and Registry number it has no post office markings apart from the Novgorod despatch. On later mail, an Odessa transit is universally applied. In addition, the routing on this official item appears to identify a named individual at Odessa who is then meant to ensure the onward transmission to Athos. If this is the correct reading, then this item may indicate that even as late as 1869, the arrangements for sending mail to Athos were in a rather provisional state. Since this entire letter came from an Athos archive (ex Christou collection), it clearly arrived and the sender seems to have been clear about what they were doing.

Comments and scans please!

Here's the first Comment from Howard Weinert:

This document was issued by the bookkeeping office of the Novgorod administrative board, part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on 29 Oct. 1869. Sent to the New Russian hermitage of St. Andrew the First Called in Mount Athos, in care of an Odessa merchant. The message says that the five rubles sent by the hermitage on 10 Jan. 1869 to pay for the official publication "Provincial News" was received in Novgorod on 25 April and noted in the account book.
I have seen many covers from the 1870s addressed to merchant Grigory Mikhailovich Butovich in Odessa for transmission to Athos. (This is not the person named on the Novgorod letter).

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Free Frank mail from Imperial Russia to Mont Athos

This is a continuation of the Blog post of  27 December 2019

I illustrate here two Free Frank letters sent from Russia to Mont Athos. They require explanation, not least because they are going outside the territory of Imperial Russia into the territory of the Ottoman Empire, though a part which enjoyed internal administrative autonomy. Nonetheless, there was an international frontier at the port of Daphne, the harbour of Mont Athos , and it was under Ottoman control until 1912-13 when control passed to Greece.

Free Frank privileges are common enough and have always been subject to abuse. In Great Britain, Members of Parliament enjoyed Free Frank privileges and thoroughly abused them before the advent of Penny Postage. With postage rates maybe ten or twenty times greater than one penny, you could do favours by posting other people’s mail - and all that was required of you was your signature on the outside of the letter and use of the House of Commons mail box.

In Imperial Russia, Free Frank privileges were extensive but subject to requirements designed to enable accounting and reduce fraud. So on the front of a letter a cachet and a number was required - the number entered into an accounting book. And on the back a seal was required which asserted the right to the Free Frank privilege. The seal could be wax, paper or the impression of another rubber or metal handstamp.

But Free Frank privilege cannot normally extend beyond the frontier unless as part of some convention or agreement with another state or within an Empire - in the British Empire, Free Frank privilege could carry an O H M S letter from a colony to London.

So how did these Free Frank letters get from Russia to Ottoman Athos without any charge being raised? The simple answer is that they travelled to their destination without passing out of Russian hands. At Odessa, Russian postal officials handed over them to Russian agents of the R O P i T shipping line. 

The R O P i T boat sailed to Athos where the Russian ship was subject to Ottoman quarantine rules. But the bags of mail were handed directly to agents of the R O P i T post office on Mont Athos without Ottoman intervention. The post office then handed them to monks from the appropriate monasteries - the bags were I believe already pre-sorted by monastery. There were really only four possible destinations, two of them represented by my letters: the skete of St Andrew and the skete of the Prophet Elijah. (The other destinations were the monastery of Panteleimon and the Kellion of St John Chrystostom).

These Free Frank letters are not common but more will be on offer in the Heinrich Koehler sale of a large collection of Mont Athos material, scheduled for March 2020.

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Imperial Russia: Official Mail and Free Frank Privileges

I guess that most countries had and still have special arrangements for charging official mail handled by public postal services rather than by official couriers. In Imperial Russia and then in Soviet Russia, there were three basic features of the arrangements:

1.Official correspondence sent as ordinary mail did not need to be franked; it had "Free Frank" privilege. Bur if the mail was Registered, then the registration fee had to be paid at the post office counter and postage stamps applied. The post office could be financially compensated by central government for carrying Free Frank mail, based on volume of mail and so on.

2. Free Frank privilege extended only to Inland mail. Foreign mail, ordinary or registered, had to be paid for and franked with stamps to cover the cost of the foreign part of the journey.

3. Free frank privilege was claimed by means of a Seal applied on the reverse of the item of mail and by means of a Registry number written at bottom left on the front of an item. Seals could be paper seals, wax seals or could be applied with a handstamp. The Registry book ensured accountability and was an anti-fraud measure.I don't think I have ever seen a Free Frank item charged Postage Due for improper use of the system.
The paper seals have from time to time been popular with  collectors and occasionally they have been passed off as official stamps. Early Zemstvo catalogues listed the pretty seals of Ananiev Zemstvo as Official Stamps and Agathon Faberge had a fine mint collection of them.

The Free Frank cover shown below has a Registry number on the front, "No. 403" - for some reason these numbers are always prefaced by Roman "No" rather than a Cyrillic equivalent. On the back there is a paper seal, fairly typical in being unreadable except for the key word "PAKETOV" which is always present on seals.

The interesting thing about this 1902 cover is where it is going. It starts off in MISHKIN YAROSL[AVL] with a 27 May strike on the front and a 28 May strike on the back.It transits in Odessa on 2 June and arrives at ROPIT AFON on 9 June.

Now Mount Athos was Ottoman Turkish territory but Free Frank privilege has worked all the way there, presumably because the cover has been handled throughout by Russian mail services. This was not always the case: ships from Odessa would drop off mail to Mont Athos in Constantinople and the ROPIT CONSTANTINOPLE office would pass them to the Ottoman post office for overland delivery. In this case, I guess that a ship dropped off mail at Mont Athos itself but I would need to do more research to insist that was the case.

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