Last updated A one grosion green stamp with stars.
The Russian post offices in Crete were established by Russia in the area of Crete it occupied as part of the joint occupying force that arrived in 1898.
Russia, officially the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with about 146.77 million people as of 2019, excluding Crimea. About 77% of the population live in the western, European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is the largest metropolitan area in Europe proper and one of the largest cities in the world; other major cities include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.
Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and Corsica. Crete and a number of surrounding islands and islets constitute the region of Crete, one of the 13 top-level administrative units of Greece. The capital and the largest city is Heraklion. As of 2011, the region had a population of 623,065.
Russia issued postage stamps for its district of Rethymno(n) in 1899. However, the postal service operated for only a very short period, from May to July.
A postage stamp is a small piece of paper issued by a post office, postal administration, or other authorized vendors to customers who pay postage, who then affix the stamp to the face or address-side of any item of mail—an envelope or other postal cover —that they wish to send. The item is then processed by the postal system, where a postmark or cancellation mark—in modern usage indicating date and point of origin of mailing—is applied to the stamp and its left and right sides to prevent its reuse. The item is then delivered to its addressee.
Rethymno is a city of approximately 40,000 people in Greece, the capital of Rethymno regional unit on the island of Crete, a former Latin Catholic bishopric as Retimo(–Ario) and former Latin titular see.
A first set of four stamps was produced by handstamping two designs, both based on the imperial Russian double eagle emblem. One design was inscribed with colorless Greek letters in colored scrolls; the one metallik value was handstamped in green, while the two metallik was issued first in rose-red shades and then in black. The other design used colored Latin letters on a white background, and appeared only as a one metallik value in blue.
Regularly printed stamps came out later in 1899, printed by Grundman & Stangel of Athens, using a design based on Poseidon's trident. They came in three values, one and two metallik and one grosion (equivalent to four metallik or one piastre), and seven colors (orange, green, yellow, rose, lilac, blue, and black). A third set was issued using a variation of this design, adding five-pointed stars in the frame around the trident, and was printed in blue, rose, green, and lilac.
Poseidon was one of the Twelve Olympians in ancient Greek religion and myth. He was god of the Sea and other waters; of earthquakes; and of horses. In pre-Olympian Bronze Age Greece, he was venerated as a chief deity at Pylos and Thebes. His Roman equivalent is Neptune.
Trident is a three-pronged spear. It is used for spear fishing and historically as a polearm. The trident is the weapon of Poseidon, or Neptune, the God of the Sea in classical mythology. In Hindu mythology, it is the weapon of Shiva, known as trishula. It has been used by farmers as a decorticator to remove leaves, seeds, and buds from the stalks of plants such as flax and hemp.
The stamps also received a violet or blue control mark, in the form of a double eagle, before being issued. They are known without the control mark, and have been extensively counterfeited as, for example, in the example shown in the picture above.
To counterfeit means to imitate something authentic, with the intent to steal, destroy, or replace the original, for use in illegal transactions, or otherwise to deceive individuals into believing that the fake is of equal or greater value than the real thing. Counterfeit products are fakes or unauthorized replicas of the real product. Counterfeit products are often produced with the intent to take advantage of the superior value of the imitated product. The word counterfeit frequently describes both the forgeries of currency and documents, as well as the imitations of items such as clothing, handbags, shoes, pharmaceuticals, aviation and automobile parts, watches, electronics, software, works of art, toys, and movies.
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