Let us look back, further back than we have before in this blog and return to 1914. It was a great period, one of modern technology, culture and fashion. Truly the height of civilization, so let's have a war.

Everyone knew a big war was coming. France wanted some stuff back that Germany had taken from it. Germany wanted to take more of everyone stuff and they were building the means to do so. Everyone had alliances with everyone else and people were just itching for a war and so it happened. The Great War to end all wars, but of course it wasn’t.

After four long brutal years, the war ends and as victors do, they start dishing out the spoils and in this case, creating new countries. One of the lucky ones was Latvia. In the aftermath of World War I, she declared independence from Russia but did Russia agree? Soviet troops were occupying Latvian territory as fast as German troops were withdrawing from it. This created shortages.

So now Latvia believes that they are an independent country and what is the first thing a new independent country must do? Issue stamps. OK, not the first thing but important enough anyway. Issuing stamps showing your own culture, heritage, customs and identity are a key part of a country's claim of independence; stamps are a symbol. So they placed an order for the printing of three million postage stamps.

"Houston we have a problem", there is a shortage of everything, including paper. How are they going to print millions of stamps?

Well the retreating Germans were not able to take everything with them and one of the things they abandoned were large numbers of unfinished maps which were stored in their Riga headquarters. There were so many that they were even being used in the Riga market to wrap fish. English fish and chips, anyone? OK not the fried kind anyway.

Now these maps were unfinished. The map side of these foldable maps was finished, but their backs, which were to show the region name, scale, etc., were not yet printed. They hadn’t been folded yet, so they were nice and flat and just waiting for someone to decide what to do with them that did not involve fish. The idea was to just turn them over and print the stamps on the other side.

The military maps on the back of these stamps, which are often upside down versus the stamp design, are usually printed in brown and black on dark cream gummed paper. Some were perforated and some imperforate, so you'll find both out there. You can find them with a blank backing, a simple line or an intense display of topography. Finding them on cover is far less common as the stamps were in use for a very short while.

Even though these map stamps have never been rare or expensive, there are forgeries out there, please don't ask me why so I won't have to lie to you.

Unfortunately the Latvians did not get their independence without a fight, and soon after declaring independence the Russians captured Riga, the capital city, and now we have a conflict involving the Soviets, the Latvian army, the Germans, as if World War One was not complicated enough. All's well that ends well as they were granted their independence two years later. The victors of World War One granted her independence.

This lasted until the second war to end all wars.

In a previous blog post, we learned that of all the countries in the world, only Czechoslovakia was selling arms to Israel and only because mother Russia, or Big Daddy, allowed them to.

Now Mommy Russia was not doing it out of the goodness of her heart, oh no, who would do that? Russia was one of the countries that immediately recognized the new state of Israel, albeit three days later. Maybe it took the email three days to arrive.

So why? Well the Cold War between the west and the east had begun in 1947 and tensions were high. The cold war actually started in 1947 with what was called the Truman Doctrine. The Americans did not want Russia to spread communism around the globe, they wanted to spread democracy instead. Good luck with democracy in Islamic countries, but that is another issue.

Many of the big boys in the Jewish State had origins in the eastern bloc. Many even spoke Russian. OK they also spoke English, German, Yiddish, French and nonsense, but since when is that relevant. So the Russians naturally thought that Israel would become a Russian satellite. Who knows they may even become a communist country.

America, on the other hand, did not trust the Jewish State for the same reason and placed an arms embargo. Actually POTUS called David Ben Gurion just before the declaration and begged him not to declare independence. The American Secretary of State George Marshall did not believe that the Jewish State would survive the war and did not want to support it. WW2 had just ended. He also did not want to loose the Arab countries. Logical after all, they had more money and were huge.

England did not want Israel not as a Jewish State and not as anything and some of their Spitfire jets attacked Israel. Some of their soldiers were actually caught as prisoners of war. Their ships still patrolled the port of Haifa after the Mandate ended and one of their generals, Glubb Pasha, was in charge of the Jordanian Legion.

But after the war, Israel did not become a satellite of Russia, nor did it buy arms from them. They bought from France. However Israel was not really on either side, the new kid just wanted to survive. Can't really blame her, right? She was faced with belligerency on all sides and constantly attacked and the world did nothing. Wait are we talking about 2021 or 1950?

Now tensions between East and West are high and the west had created the NATO defense pact. In May 1955, the Soviet Union and her satellites created their own defense pact, the Warsaw Pact. Bulgaria was one of the countries which was a part of that pact and there begins our story of the day.

EL AL, Israel's state airline, which was once jokingly referred to as Every Landing Always Late, was on a routine flight from London to Tel Aviv on the evening of Tuesday, July 26, 1955. It departed Heathrow Airport en route to Lod (today Ben-Gurion International Airport), via Vienna and and then Istanbul. After a brief layover at the Austrian capital, the Lockheed Constellation – a four-engine propeller plane – took off for Istanbul shortly before 3 A.M. on July 27.

Soon after takeoff, the flight encountered a thunderstorm, something that was known to cause distortions in the old-fashioned NDR navigation system in use in those days. In the case of LY-402, which was flying along the “Amber 10” air lane, it appears that the pilot changed course after concluding incorrectly that he had passed over the Skopje (Macedonia) navigation beacon. This change of direction caused the aircraft to cross from Yugoslavia into Bulgaria, near the border village of Tran.

Detecting the violation of its airspace, the Bulgarian air force scrambled two MiG-15 “Fagot” jet fighters from the Dobroslavtsi airfield to intercept the intruder. The plane flew over Bulgaria for 200km with the two Bulgarian jets trailing it for most of that distance, and at the time the pilots claimed to have issued several warning shots, but this claim was soon retracted. According to a history of Bulgarian aviation, the deputy commander of Bulgarian air defense, Gen. Velitchko Georgiev, told the two pilots, “If the plane is leaving our territory, disobeying orders, and there is no time left for more warnings, then shoot it down.”

What’s clear is that, as the civilian plane neared the country’s southern border and was about to cross into Greek airspace, the MiGs fired at it. The Constellation exploded at an altitude of 2,000 feet, with its pieces falling to earth near Petrich, Bulgaria. 51 passengers and seven crew members were killed.

So I am browsing the net, looking for a certain item and I find it. I go through the purchase process and get to shipping and find, what? That Israel is one of the few countries that they don’t ship to. Why is that? Could it be for ideological reasons or could it be that Israeli post has a bad reputation? Doesn’t make a difference, they don’t ship to Israel, yet it is an item I want, be it a cover or an item of clothing. So?

Well today there are services in place, via a third party. You pay for a service which provides you a post box number in, say America, and have them ship there. That same service then collects your parcel from that postbox and forwards it to you for an exorbitant fee and you are happy.

What has that good to do with philately? Good question, thank you for asking. In 1967 Israel took over control of what is known as the West Bank and Gaza and I am intentionally leaving politics out of it here. However, all of a sudden, we have a few millions new inhabitants who are closed off from their family. They can’t use email as it hasn’t been invented yet and they can’t send letters as no postal relations exist between Israel and many of those countries, many who are still in a state of war with Israel.

So what can they do? The answer my friend is not blowing in the wind, it is in the first paragraph. A third part!

The first obvious system was the Red Cross. With the Red Cross you could send a message to anyone via the Red Cross, however these were brief messages and anyone can read them. If you don’t like what is written there, somehow it will not be delivered.

Along comes a bright spark and says, let us send mail via the London Post Master and they did. How did it work? A letter was sent from Israel to the Post Master of King Edwards Street in London. Enclosed in that letter was another letter intended for a third country, say Iraq, and an International Reply Coupon. This coupon was intended for use by the London Post Master to pay for the service. One advantage was that the chances of the mail being read was minimal and you could write whatever you want and how much you want. Actually there was a second address in London and an address in Cyprus.

Ingenious, right? Well it was modelled after the famous World War 2 Thomas Cook service in which someone from Nazi occupied areas could send mail to family or friends living in Great Britain or Palestine, for that matter, to an undercover address of POB 506, Lisbon, Portugal. The Thomas Cook office in Lisbon would then forward the mail to Great Britain or other countries.

As exhibitors and collectors we are always after that WOW item, the item that you have been looking for, or the item that you saw and think wow, why didn’t I think of that before. As collectors, it is nice if others look at the item and also say, wow. It is not even a case of money since not every wow item is expensive. For me, I had not really found an item like that in some time.

While in Verona in November 2019, at the ECTP 2019 exhibition, in which I won the Champion of Champion class (hey if I don't blow my own trumpet, who will), I saw an exhibit on Columbus. I discussed with a friend to and we decided to see how the exhibitor approached the issue of Queen Isabella of Spain. I wanted to improve my page about Jews not being wanted.

We thought that there may be covers of some kind, sent by Queen Isabella, and then we saw it, the WOW item. It was a cover sent to Friar Diego Pineda of Toledo in 1582. Friar Diego Pineda was an official consultant to the Santo Oficio a San Cristóbal or the Holy Office of the Inquisition. We never even considered this direction.

We will not go into the history of the Inquisition as many of us already know it; the history is not new to us. Just to make it short, the Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdom and to replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was under Papal control.

Basically they said "its our way or the highway" meaning either convert, be killed or leave.

The full name of the Inquisition was Santo Oficio de la Romana y Universal Inquisicion or “Holy Work of the Roman and Universal Inquisition". Santo Oficio means “Holy Job or Work”. Since the name was actually Holy Work of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, it was shortened to el Santo Oficio which was a far more used name for the institution than Inquisition, which was the preferred term of Anglophile countries, most likely because for Protestants, Holy Work sounds too good for the evil abhorrent Catholic tribunal.

The tribunal in Toledo was established in 1485 and the Inquisitor General there presided over the court in the Church of San Cristobal. As yet I have not been able to find information about the consultant just that his full name was Friar Diego Pineda.

The story of the inquisition fits my story perfectly. Now I really needed an item of my own. I approached the exhibitor who put me in touch with a site. I did a search there and found the cover he originally purchased and amazingly found a second item which I immediately purchased.

The cover eventually arrived and it is quite similar. It was also sent from Madrid to Toledo, again to Friar Pineda. Sent 8th March, 1575, and postage paid was ½Real.

Hi everyone, welcome back.

I have just sold an interesting cover that I purchased last century for a lot of money and sold it again for a little bit of money. Perhaps I could have sold it for a bit more but I wanted to buy something else and that is the name of the game.

I want to tell you about this item as it is a true piece of history, a piece showing the face of antisemitism, before the Holocaust.

As we all know, the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933 and immediately began issuing many anti Jewish (and others of course) regulations. The underlying idea was to remove non Aryans, mainly Jews, from public life. This became known as the Reich Citizenship Law.

The Fifth Ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Law of 27 September 1938 removed all Jewish lawyers from the bar. They were only allowed to work as consultants to provide legal advice to Jewish clients, Dr Berl Cooper was one such Consultant.

Only 10% of licensed Jewish lawyers were allowed to work as consultants.