Romanian Postal History

I have been collecting Romanian postal history, a fascinating topic because border regions have changed names and postmarks as borders shifted between nations. For example Odesa in Ukraine was under Romanian administration during World War II. However my most recent area of interest is Romanian ship mail. There is lots of information on the ship mail of other countries but Romanian ship mail information is rather obscure and seldom available in English. Here is an example of a postmark from a postcard on the Danube River. I am interested in sharing information on these types of covers.

That is a very strange example. That was an occupation. It was not a recognised change in borders.

sasker,

Collecting for the enjoyment of collecting, whatever that might be, is the name of the game. Don't hesitate to ask questions especially if you need basic information and especially more advanced sources of information for any possible topic. You should be able to find folks on this board a little further along on their collecting journey glad to share experiences.

My personal bias is a used stamp loses the story of its journey in the postal service when it is removed from the cover it transported to its destination. Collecting postal history adds a whole new aspect to your journey in our hobby. Sounds like you are a perfect candidate to become a postal history collector?

Wishing you many enjoyable future days in our hobby. Russ

Hello NSK. Of course you are correct. This was in reality an occupation by Germany with the cooperation of the Romanian puppet regime. The point is that borders changed and different stamps were used for correspondence. Perhaps a better example would be Transylvania which initially used Austrian stamps, then Hungarian stamps (after the dual monarchy was formed), then Romanian (after WWI), then Hungarian (during its occupation of parts of Transylvania in WW!!) and finally Romania again. Other regions were Banat, Bukovina, Dobrogea, and what is today Moldova, all of which saw the names of towns and the jurisdiction of the post offices change.

However this begs the question about the postmark I included which represents a ship-based post office operating between Galati and Tulcea. Does anyone know how long these were used or which other communities were serviced? Was there a particular shipping company that was employed?