Romania: 1920 - 1922 King Ferdinand Definitives

I really get into these definitive issue variances myself.  I will set out series of perforation and page variances, as well as obvious color shades.  I have several pages of the Romanian in question.

The 5 bani, Sc.249, also has a grey (war) paper version and a paper version with blue threads which I don't have. Also the same perf variations apply as the 1 bani. I seem to have only the perf 13.5 and the 11.5. One thing I have also noticed is that there seems to be a lot of variation in the quality of the perforations or, perhaps, the perforating machines. Many have rough perfs that are easy to mistake for roulette perfs. Some of these I am simply unable to obtain an accurate perforation measurement from because there are either no perfs or not enough to show me definitively what gauge the stamp is.



Below are the ones I can say for sure are 13.5.







The sole 11.5 perf is this one.



The one I could not measure properly is probably 13.5 because I have noticed a trend that when the stamp is rough perfed, when I can measure it, they tend to all be 13.5. You can see this in one of the stamps above that does measure 13.5.



The above stamp, to me, is also interesting because of the "mandate" postmark. This leads me to believe it was used in an area such as Bessarabia, Bukovina, Transylvania, Banat, Crișana and Maramureș which eventually became part of Romania around this time with the end of WWI and the collapse of Imperial Russia.

The 15 bani red brown is more limited in terms of perforation varieties both for the white paper variety and the gray (war) paper variety. This is reflected also in the number of varieties I have in my stock. I have only the white paper variety with 11.5 perforations and the same for the gray (war paper). I have no other perforation varieties even though the white paper exists as both 11.5 and 13.5x11.5 and the gray paper exists as 11.5, 13.5x11.5 and 13.5x14.5. There is also a blue lint (thread) paper variety with 11.5 perfs.

My white paper appears to be scuffed on the face, however, this will be the one that goes onto my album pages. 


I am leaving the gray paper stamps for my separately created pages for varieties unless it is the only stamp I have.

Up until now, all the issues of the King Ferdinand definitive issue I have posted had been printed and issued in January of 1920. Three denominations, however, were issued in May of 1921, the first of which was another 25 bani brown or pale brown.

This stamp, as well as the other denominations printed at that time, was only printed on white paper but all 5 perf variations of the earlier issues exist. Of the five possible varieties, I only have two, the 13.5 all around and the 13.5x11.5.

 13.5x11.5 (the first stamp on the left came from the recent giveaway by vikingeck )

13.5

I had implied in one of my first couple of posts on this thread that I thought the "mandate" postmark might have something to do with various territorial mandates. This, however, is likely wrong. After exploring the romaniastamps.com website a bit more I came across an area devoted to town postmarks and the mandate postmark seems to have been pretty common and simply meant postal mandate in English. Needless to say, it and the Bucuresti (Bucharest) city name seem to be the most common postmarks on Romanian stamps with only a few exceptions in the collection I have put together.

The 50 bani, Sc.# 255, only comes in a white paper version, no war paper, but unlike the 40 bani, I have a number of different perforation varieties. The 50 bani comes in the full range, 13.5, 11.5, 11.5x13.5, 13.5x11.5 and 13.5x14.5. There are also thin and very thin paper varieties.

The 13.5 perforation seems to be the most common. The stamp on the far right is another incorporated from vikingeck's giveaway.



Below is the 11.5 x 13.5 perforation variety.



And finally, the 11.5 perforation. It is possible that this stamp was postmarked in Braila, a town/city in the southeast are of Romania, near the Black Sea.

I was thinking about this cancellation this evening and it occurred to me that the postmark had to be Hungarian given the spelling TEMESVAR instead of Timisoara...a bit of a head-smacking moment actually. So I did a google search for "postmarks of Hungary". Here is the stamp again that I referenced earlier with the large numeral 6 and below that the top quarter of the circular postmark with the name of TEMESVAR. Then, if you look closely, you can see the top portion of the Crown of St. Stephen, a design motif common on Hungarian stamps of this pre-war time period which is what tipped me off and caused me to say..."duh".



Sure enough, I found a Wikimedia Commons page filled with the Postmarks of Hungary at Postmarks of Hungary

At the bottom of the page are three cancellations from the World War I period and the last stamp in the row has the same postmark with the numeral 2. The Crown of St. Stephen is a bit blurred on this cancellation strike but it is there.



By BRANDMAYER Vilmos - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25390368

Great thread @darkomex. The romaniastamps website is a great resource, thanks for sharing.

So let's keep going because except for one stamp the remaining high values were printed in May of 1921, like the 25 bani, brown which I talked about earlier in this thread. These two values are the 1 leu rose, Sc. no 257 and the 2 lei, deep blue, Sc. no. 259. Like the preceding 2 lei orange, the remaining high values only come in white paper, no gray or blue lint and there are the five different perforation varieties including 13.5, 11.5, 11.5x13.5, 13.5x11.5 and 13.5x14.5. Let me look at both values here and point out the interesting bits where I can find them.

The 1 leu rose, 11.5 perf is below with the mandate postmark and including a date of August 20, 1921.
11.5 perf

The 13.5 perf varieties below include a stamp on the far right with a very lightly struck postmark that includes the letters "ORV". There doesn't seem to be enough legible text for me to be able to puzzle out more of this town name. I also see a slightly different circular postmark in the middle stamp of the row with single no. 1. Possibly the town name for this postmark was at the bottom as there is a partial postmark at the top of this stamp with some partial letters showing. It is unfortunate that so many of these stamps do not have more "socked-on-the-nose" type postmarks as it would be interesting to see where they originated.
13.5 perf

I have two perf variations of the 2 leu deep blue below. The left-most stamp cancellation seems to include the word "montain" though I could not identify a town or city name in Romania that included this. All of the stamps, in fact, in this row have such lightly struck cancellations that the town names are illegible which seems to be another common difficulty in identifying origins of these stamps.
13.5x11.5 perf

13.5 perf

As far as organizing and mounting I haven't delved into the create-your-own-pages thing too much yet and pretty much use Steiner at this point for all my album needs. I used Steiner's blank quadrille page template and put a title on it in similar font to his Romania pages. These pages will be used for all the varieties as I seem to have developed both a knowledge and interest in this particular definitive issue of Romania. I tended to mount the stamps in the middle of the page so that I could simply expand outward as I added varieties to my collection. I know my pages look a bit haphazard and messy as I use pencil to note catalogue number, perfs and paper and I seem to have not centered the stamp properly on the page when I initially started mounting, and then changed my mind along the way. But, who cares, anyway..it's my collection after all.

I had vowed this year to spend some time on one area of philately and see it through to completion rather than jumping around from one country to another as I usually do and I feel like I accomplished this goal with this thread. I learned a lot about this one definitive issue of Romania thanks to romaniastamps.com. If you have any interest in Romanian stamps, I highly recommend this site as he has a wealth of information that you cannot get anywhere else seemingly. Collecting the stamps of Romania from this classic era period is worth exploring as there is a lot out there to flyspeck, research and it is fun when you find those hidden gems like the inverted overprint that I didn't realize I had.

I hope all of you have enjoyed this thread and I hope at some point to continue with this or other stamps of Romania from this time period but for now I am going to move onto other things.

darkormex - I echo what stanley64 said. Your way of organizing the varieties is simplistic and  yet genious at the same time. That was exactly how I originally planned to sort my varieties to, until I got too involved in creating my own pages. But creating specialized pages for all such varieties does take a lot of time - in particular when specialized catalogs offer tons of varieties - your approach is a huge timesaver. And the basic set on proper pages followed by a 'quadrille-playground' also make it more clear that these are just that - varieties - and thus a sens of a specialized collection. Well done! I will consider the same approach for certain areas with a wealth of varieties, where making pages for all the varieties simply gets overwhelming. The first that comes to mind is Victoria - and the posthorns of Norway!

My brother Jens barbu is creating custom pages for Rumania as we speak - that stampsite is excellent reference, thanks for sharing.

Great work darkormex ! My Romania stamps have gone to another member in a trade but I love to see your posts - Thanks

René