Big Blue 1840-1940: Bulgaria

Български пощи

Bulgarian Post

Bud's Big Blue
Bud's Observations

Bob, author of the savvy “Filling Spaces” blog, often asks of advanced BB collectors, “What would you do differently if you were starting over?”

For one, I would learn to transliterate (sadly, translation is way beyond me) from Bulgarian Cyrillic to Latin alphabet equivalents. Sometimes this task is complicated by typeface variations, as on the St Clement, Paisius of Hilendar, and Tsar Simeon stamps, page 6. Further, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Ukrainian also require transliteration, for these have slightly different alphabetic characters. Not only would learning transliteration have helped me better to understand the subject matter of the stamps, but also the cancellations would have been more readily identifiable. So, I’m trying to catch up. Bulgaria does Romanize some cancels, such as the София/Sofia on the bottom row, page 1, last stamp.

One effect of my not bothering to learn something of Cyrillic is that the Bulgaria BB section filled up without my giving much attention to it. The stamps are plentiful and inexpensive, so feeder albums provided almost all that BB specified. Page 6 was the last to fill up, and 5 lev (лева) postal tax stamp was the hardest to find. I actually bought it from a dealer in Bulgaria.

Census: 314 in BB spaces, 30 tipped-in, 62 on supplement pages.

Jim's Observations
Bulgaria's stamps are really inexpensive, and the Big Blue collector should have a field day.

You might very well have stamps in your collection for which Big Blue does not provide spaces. I found 68 stamps close to the minimum catalogue value that are not included. But Big Blue DOES have ten pages-not bad for this interesting country!

The collector might want to double check the 1902 Battle of Shipka Pass Issue- forgeries abound.

Bulgaria Blog Post and Checklist

Page 1 (Click and enlarge for examination.)