What Country Does This Stamp Come ?

Can anyone tell me where this stamp is from ? Thank you in advance

Armenia?

Thank you ! It's Armenia indeed !

Sorry to say, but this is a forgery, common for the whole issue.
For one, this is a brownish gray where the original is a milky blue. That can fade into a pale gray but not quite like this. The brownish gray is a known forgery.

Further, the inner line of the scroll should end right around where the arrow points for the genuine. And the "clouds" the other arrow points to should be a larger comma-shaped white spot.

They were printed in Paris in May 1922 but never issued as the Soviets invaded Armenia around the same time. They were then released to the European philatelic market along with reprints and other issues to cover the printing costs. They are priced by Gibbons at GBP1 each but are not catalogued. As the plates were in Paris, they were extensively reprinted for the philatelic trade.

They can also be found crudely perforated 11 1/2. A number of colours are known, some shown in this scan. They can be found surcharged in kopeks but again, these issues never saw philatelic use.

It's difficult to classify them because they were genuinely printed for postal use, but as they were never issued in this form I put them under cinderellas.

So if the printer still had the plates and could reprint as many copies as the market could bear, why would anyone bother forging the stamp?

Tchilingharian and Ashford ask the same question indirectly in their 1960 handbook. Despite the quantity of genuine Armenia stamps available on the market, they were extensively forged.

The same problem arises with a number of other countries such as Central Lithuania and Azerbaijan. It goes to show that the margins were sufficient in the packet trade to justify forging even common stamps.

EKBUSTAD ---Price , the printer wanted to make a decent profit and some forger wanted to sell 10 of thousands to all the packet makers and fiqured it would be cheap to make his own .

My quess is the printer did the work to get stamp album makers to include that set in their pages . That guaranteed a strong market of buyers and the forger just stepped in .

For reference, this extract from the handbook helps in differentiting forgeries from genuine stamps. There are also secret marks in some issues which are not present in the forgeries.