Wenden: Governorate Of Livonia, Imperial Russia

I acquired this interesting stamp of Wenden recently. It is listed in Scott Catalogue under Russia (at the back) as L10.



Wenden was an administrative county of Livonia, a Baltic Governorate of Imperial Russia, from about 1712 to 1918. It is now part of Latvia and Estonia. Wenden is now in Latvia, called Cesis.

Wikipedia Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govern...e_of_Livonia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livonia

Maps:

Present day Latvia and Estonia, showing the approximate location of Livonia and Wenden:


Wenden in 1898:


Livonia, 1898:


You can see the full maps on the Wikipedia pages.

Otherwise, very little can be found on Wenden stamps on the internet, though there seems to be indication they are some sort of locals. I am looking for more information on these issues.

The following questions come up.

1) Why were these stamps issued when Russian stamps were available?

2) Who authorized the stamps to be issued?

3) Are they local post stamps?

4) If they are locals, why are the listed in Scott? They list 12 stamps from 1861 to 1901.


Any information would be appreciated.

They show up in Michel as well. It has a short story on them; I'll try to translate the German into English for you.

After an 1864 imperial law, city councils were obligated to distribute the mail from the main city to the surrounding villages. In order to facilitate this, an additional law (date of September 03, 1870 is given) allowed for these local stamps to be issued.
They were only allowed to be used on pieces that had the normal Russian stamps on them. I.e. they were additional postage for distribution in the Wenden region.

That's the best I can do, although I do have a small and useless factoid: a few years ago, I've actually visited Cesis. It's a quite charming town.

Thanks Tinus. That is most interesting. But Wenden was such a small town, I wonder why the other larger areas did not issue such stamps?

Oh, and another question:

Why are the stamps inscribed in German?

I can only answer the second question for you.

The German speaking elite had a firm hand in the goings on in a lot of the Baltic towns and cities since the Middle Ages. The Russian empire failed to put an end to that, meaning the people with any sort of power in these districts (local notaries, judges, lawyers and land owners) were Baltic Germans.

Edit: just noticed there is a Dutch Wikipedia article on this. Too much for me to translate here, but might be interesting to give the link in any case.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendensche_Kreispost

I've shown this before but it has been awhile. You don't often see Wenden with anything other than marker cancels.

That is a nice stamp Cjd. I read somewhere that all Wenden stamps on mail were pen cancelled (or not cancelled at all), and any cancels were applied in transit by Russia.

I can clearly see the date 1891 on your copy. Can you make out the town name?

I'm reviving this thread. Wenden may seem like a small town today but in the 1500s it was important because of its fortifications, its castle, situated on trade routes. It was fought over in battles of the Livonian War (between the Russians under Ivan the Terrible) and the Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians. Wikipedia will fill you in a bit.

We forget that before the rise of the Kingdom of Prussia, the major players in central Europe were in the Baltic Region. Russia was growing powerful, Sweden already was, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (controlling most of Ukraine) were major powers. Prussia had been merely one among dozens of German principalities but was setting out on its rise, during the 1600s-1700s, to a major power, a kingdom, eventually the nucleus of a unified Germany.

But that lay in the future. In the 1600s, Germany had been fragmented into hundreds of principalities ever since the medieval German-Italian empire fell apart around 1250. German-speaking power was centered also to the east of Prussia, in Austria (and what par otf Hungary had not been overrun by the Turks). Austria ended where Poland-Lithuania began, Poland Lithuania ended where Russia and Sweden began. These were the big players.

Far to the West, the Atlantic Powers: Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese were fighting over the control of the Atlantic and all the trade routes to the east and to the west, around the globe. Between those Atlantic powers and the central European powers named above, was a checkerboard "wasteland" of German (and Italian) counties, duchies, princedoms, city-states, prince-bishops, and a few dozen other sorts of states. The Thirty Years War was fought over that checkerboard terrain as well as parts of central Europe. France and Spain were involved but not the other Atlantic powers.

And just to add a bit of spice, the Turks were still trying to take Vienna, so to the southeast was another war-frontier. The Poles and Austrians turned them back from Vienna in 1683 and Buda in 1686.

Wenden was not nearly so isolated and insignificant in the 1500s as it might seem today. On the other hand, I don't want to be misunderstood as suggesting it was a major city. It wasn't at all. But it had a strategically important castle. By the 1800s Russia had completed it's rise, divided Poland and the Baltic nations with Prussia and Austro-Hungary. But Wenden remained an administrative center. Sweden had shrunk somewhat, after centuries of war with Russia, was headed toward the neutrality that characterized it in the 20thc.

And that's where the stamps came from, from what by the mid-180s was a relative backwater area of Europe, under Russian control. But things had not always been that way.

I have gathered some images of genuine as well as a Sperati forgery here:

http://stampforgeries.com/forged-st...den-livonia/