Death clearing and my father's stamps

My (two) sisters and I recently had our annual reunion (we live in three different countries) in Ljubljana. At our age, the talk of course turned to death clearing. I seem to have kept the main collection of my father’s stamps. He was an avid collector of new issues from the UK post office but although they were in pristine condition, stamps are only worth something if they have some fault that makes them interesting and rare.

Suddenly I remembered poring over my first stamp book with him, aged about 10, and a black stamp saying Bessarabia from around the time of WWI, although it could have been before WWII. It somehow stuck in my mind that he knew where Bessarabia was and it meant something to him. Not that I knew where Bessarabia was.

So I looked up what could be special about a black stamp from Bessarabia. I found there was even a book of short stories actually called Bessarabian stamps (which is now ordered for my birthday). I can’t remember anything more about the stamp in the stamp book, except it was black. But considering it must have been in the 1950s and colour printing didn’t really get going till the 1960s, that’s not really surprising. So I couldn’t find much about stamps from Bessarabia that would make them interesting.

Image from Amazon.com

So what about Bessarabia then? My father Nick was supposed to be Polish, and Poland is nowhere near Bessarabia, you might have thought. But when you live in Lithuania, you learn that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea. So who knows what is included in Polish school history?

One of the big surprises to me on our first car trip to Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, was how close everything was to each other. We were driving down the motorway on our way to Budapest for Christmas, and there were signs to Prague and Vienna and Bratislava, and they were closer than London is to Birmingham. We had to revise our geography quickly. This taught me that my brain tends to measure distance from the place I live, not the place I am actually passing at the time.

So please notice on this modern map of Western Ukraine, that Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk (with the blue dot) used to be in Galicia (Austro-Hungary) up to WWI and then in Poland until WWII. Whereas Uzhgorod (famous later in my stories about Murmansk) used to be in Hungary until WWII. On the map it looks like it is in Slovakia, not Hungary. Przemysl is in Poland.

Chernivtsi used to be in the Bukovina in Austro-Hungary up to WWI and then in Romania until WWII. Finally at the bottom of the map, Satu Mare is in Romania. Radauti and Suceava used to be Bukovina in Austro-Hungary but are now in Romania. Edinets and Balti are in Moldova.

Just for scale, google maps says Lviv to Ivano-Frankivsk is 2 hrs 15min by car and Ivano-Frankivsk to Chernivtsi is the same. So slightly over the time from London to Birmingham, which is my mental scale for distance, even now.

This map is going to come up a lot in my stories about 3 fathers, so you should get to grips with it.

From Wikipedia centred on Halich

So one day in 2016, I found myself visiting Edinets in Moldova. It was part of a project where I had to visit the mayors in about 20 small towns in Moldova, to talk to them about what they had been doing, and what they needed. Although Moldova has the reputation as the poorest country in Europe, the north-south roads in Moldova were very good quality and so we did everything as a series of day trips from Chisinau, the capital. In any case, I was warned that there were no (suitable) hotels operating in the area, and we were hard pressed to find lunch. As we approached Edinets, I suddenly saw a road sign for Kamenets-Podilsky. But that’s in Ukraine I thought. Since I only needed a map of Moldova for work, I wasn’t really looking beyond it. And once again my brain had tricked me over distance. Google maps suggests they are less than 2 hours apart. So when just now I looked more carefully at maps of Bessarabia, I realised I had actually been there during that visit.

The Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire roughly corresponds to what is now most of Moldova and some parts of Chernivtsi and Odesa oblasts (provinces) of Ukraine, according to Wikipedia. It existed from 1812 to 1917. Around 65% of the territory of the former governorate now belongs to the Republic of Moldova (including the breakaway region of Transnistria); around 35% belongs to Ukraine.

For some reason I have never been to Romania, in all my work in Eastern Europe. Now on my bucket list is a proper trip to Bessarabia, including Kamenets-Podolski (first time) and Chernivtsi again (I went in 1995). The border crossings between Romania and Ukraine have been improved recently to make for quicker crossing in and out, so maybe sooner rather than later. We’ll see.