Spotlight: The oldest stamp in my collection

1927 U.S.S.R. Esperanto stamp

Sooner or later in the growth of every young stamp collector, there comes a time when he feels his collection will forever remain incomplete until he adds to it that storied philatelic ancestor from which all subsequent stamps are descended -- the Penny Black. This, however, is not the tale of how I acquired my first Penny Black -- mainly because I have not acquired a Penny Black yet, but also because the title above would not hold much interest to the reader if its referent were a stamp about which hundreds of articles have already been written.

Instead, the oldest stamp in my collection as of now is one that was issued in 1927 by the U.S.S.R. It commemorates forty years since the creation of the Esperanto language and features an oval portrait of Esperanto's inventor, L.L. Zamenhof (1859-1917). Measuring 43.5x24 millimeters, the stamp is printed on thick paper, which has presumably helped it survive with no creases or other damage for almost a full hundred years. I picked up the stamp for ₪2 ($0.58) at my local dealer's shop.

Other noteworthy details on the stamp include an image of a dense industrial city with at least a dozen smokestacks jutting up from its rooftops as it is engulfed by a smoky white cloud. Esperanto's green star, encompassing an area almost as large as Zamenhof's portrait, hangs over the city like a foregrounded midday Sun, and a crane stretching up from the buildings' midst to the star's center dangles the Roman numerals "XL" from its tip. The word "ESPERANTO," extending across the bottom of the city, is the most prominent word on the stamp, and below that the stamp's value is indicated as "K·14K·" -- 14 kopeks. A watermark in the style of a rosette and Greek border is clearly visible on the reverse side of the stamp.

My Esperanto stamp bears the markings of two circular cancellations, indicating there was at least one other stamp alongside it at the time it was used for postage. If it were possible to superimpose the two cancellations over each other, they would almost reconstruct a full circle. I can thus piece together a cancellation date of "121027." The letters in the upper part of the circle are more difficult to make out, but I am able to extrapolate the sequence МОСКВА [?] ЭКСП -- "MOSCOW [?] EXP," i.e. Moscow [?] Expedition -- where the bracketed question mark represents a number that is too vague to identify conclusively but looks to me like either a three, an eight or a nine. This number would refer to either a department within Moscow's main post office or a branch of the post office elsewhere in the city.

What was the significance of Esperanto to communist Russia? Philatelist Trevor Pateman, whose areas of expertise are Russia and Eastern Europe, had this to say on the topic in an article on his blog from 2017, "Esperanto in early Bolshevik Russia":

As would-be world revolutionaries, the early Bolsheviks were sympathetic to Esperanto. It provided a means of international communication before the hegemony of English was established. Since Esperanto is basically a Romance language with a Roman alphabet, Russians who used it were making a bigger effort than those they were writing to. In any case, as Leninism turned to Stalinism, Esperanto fell out of favour as did any kind of private international communication even through authorised channels. This can be seen for example, in the decline of Philatelic Exchange letters in the 1930s. Private individuals were simply too afraid to send them.

The 1927 "Esperanto" is one of four stamps I have that feature Zamenhof. The other three are from Poland (1959), Brazil (1960) and Bulgaria (1987). These, in turn, are part of a small collection of language-themed stamps that spans two pages in my album and whose slow, calculated expansion is a source of growing delight.