Friday, September 26, 2014

Traditionalist postage stamp

Only just found: the world's only known Traditionalist postage stamp.

Issued by the Moldovan Post Office (Posta Moldovei) in 2007, a series of three stamps featured the Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), the Moldovan opera singers Anastasia Dicescu (1887-1945) and Maria Bieșu (1935-2012), and Mircea Eliade (1907-1986).

Inset in the Eliade stamp, shown here, are two well-known photographs of Eliade, the covers of two of his better known books (The Myth of the Eternal Return and the History of Religious Ideas), and--less predictably--a photograph of Guénon and Schuon in Cairo.

The stamp was designed by Elena Karacenţev (b. 1960), a Moldovan artist who grew up in what was then Leningrad, and so perhaps discovered Eliade in a Russian version.

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