Tag: Finland stamp

There is an old slogan from the Fennoman independence movement. Swedes we are not, Russians we can never be, therefore Finns we must be. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

Todays stamp does a good job in telling the story of Kuula with just a picture. A very serious younger man of some class portrayed in a country setting. After all an areas natural culture arises from peasants in the countryside and then formalized by a more serious and educated upper class in the city.

Todays stamp is issue A356, a 30 Markka stamp issued by Finland on July 7th, 1983. The stamp celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of classical piano and choral composer Toivo Kuula. According to the Scott catalog, the single stamp issue is worth 40 cents used.

Toivo Kuula was born in Finland and studied under legendary Finnish composer Jean Sebelius. Though he had experience as a conductor and an unfinished symphony at the time of his early, unexpected death, he was most famous for his choral works that were usually accompanied by piano and perhaps a small string section.

The Finland of Kuula’s youth was a Grand Dutchy that pledged allegiance to Czarist Russia. The people still had many ties to neighboring Sweden including language. Rising up from the peasant class was a unique local culture and language that many hoped could form the basis for a new independent Finland that was free of both Russia and Sweden.

Part of this is a movement to make more formal the local peasant culture that often included stirring, patriotic, and romantic songs sung in local dialects around the campfire at the end of a hard days work in the fields. I recently did a Yugoslav stamp featuring Vuk Karadzic who was doing similar work in Serbia. See https://the-philatelist.com/2018/07/30/communist-yugoslavia-1950-sells-off-the-invalid-exile-stamps/ . Ataturk in Turkey was doing similar things. He went so far as to bring in Austrians to do classical arrangements of the Turkish peasant campfire songs. The challenge of course is to keep the passion and local flavor of the music intact as it is turned into something played in a opera house. According to the music critics of the day, Kuula pieces such as “The maiden and the Boyar’s son.” and “The sea-bathing maids” did a good job of this. Kuula’s teacher Sibelius famously said “Don’t listen to critics, they don’t make statues for critics”. He has a point and after listening to a few of the pieces I wonder if Kuula did a better job with titles than the music itself.

Kuula did not live to enjoy an independent Finland he was so in favor of. He was partying in a hotel on a Saints festival day when he was hit by a stray bullet fired from a group of nearby Jagers.  Jagers were independence fighters that were Finns trained and funded by Germany as a way to shrink and weaken Russia. They were successful in breaking Finland off from chaotic revolutionary 1917 Russia and the soon after the collapse of Germany prevented Finland from becoming a German stooge. Interesting to me that Germany was behind the independence movement, I had detected some German influence in the music of Kuula as well. Why do locals so often get co-opted by outside forces?

Well my drink is empty. Come again for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2018.

Welcome readers to todays offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. We have an interesting story to tell of a giant building, later expanded and ask what should be done with it now.

The stamp today is from 1930s Finland. It was a time of functionalist architecture. The independence of Finland was fairly new, so the capital needed a large office building to administer the countries postal system. The design was local but one cannot help but notice how strikingly similar the stamp and building are too many from 1930-1960 throughout Europe and the world.

Today’s stamp is issue A44, a 9 Markha stamp issued by Finland in 1939 to celebrate the recent opening of the new main post office building in Helsinki. It was part of a three stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth 50 cents in it’s used condition.

Finland achieved its independence in 1917. The territory had passed several times between Russia and Sweden but was sparsely populated and still contained an indigenous group of people, the Sami, who are somewhat analogous to Eskimos. The national leader, Mannerheim, was busy learning the Finnish language and Lutheran Finland attempted prohibition of alcohol, something the Russian Czars had never allowed in the Grand Duchy period. There were also problems with borders and getting everyone on the same page culturally. Typical stuff for a new country.

What there was also was a lot of institution building and bigger government. This was true whether the country was socialist or capitalist. So new universities, and government offices and more city living. To deal with these trends, a new style of architecture grew up called functionalism. The American Architect Louis Sullivan famously said form follows function. The large workforces being built to administer the growing institutions needed large buildings to house the workers within. The buildings would not be quasi cathedrals to God or King but rather be purposely designed for the function. Decoration was to a minimum but the massive structures needed to be strong and steel reinforced concrete was specified.

In the case of the Finland main post office a competition was started in 1934 and the building was completed in 1938. The architects were Finns and did the job while they were still in there 20s. Their training was local as well but it is clear that despite the attempts by the government to develop a distinctive local style, the result was somewhat generic. The post office function was well looked after and when additional space was needed a new floor was added seamlessly in the 1950s. The building is still in use today.

With the decline in postal volumes, the building is today somewhat underutilized. This is true of so many of these edifices from the functional architecture period. There is a tendency by governments just to let things like this go on even if times have changed.

I have a modest proposal for this building and the many like it around the world. Rather than knocking them down or just letting them gradually fall into disuse, repurpose them as housing. Young people flock to big cities and many have put off marriage and child rearing. What they need are centrally located affordable places to live. Local housing stock tends to be taken by older established people and conversely by those on the public dole. With government ownership this building  could be rented out slightly above cost but without subsidy and provide convenient, safe affordable housing for the young people that are so necessary for the vibrancy of a city. The postal museum inside could continue as a nod to the buildings past. Just a suggestion.

Well my drink is empty. Come again  for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2018

In 1929, the Finnish city of Paimio issued a requirement for a new tuberculosis sanitarium. There was no cure for tuberculosis, the best chance for the patient was to attempt to ride it out under a doctors care. Sounds like a miserable place with suffering and death all around. The building built to the requirement became much more than that. Finland was a new country and there was a new generation of architects ready to try out new ideas. One of those was architect Alvar Aalto. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The early rational movement architecture was quite large and blocky, if not yet brutally so. The stamp designers use of bright colors do a good job of showing the building in it’s best light. There is just not room to show the special features inside to make this easier for patients and staff.

Todays stamp is issue A294, a 1 Markka stamp issued by Finland on May 2nd, 1978. It was a two stamp issue in different denominations featuring the work of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto two years after his death. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $1.00 used.

Alvar Aalto was born in 1898 when Finland was still a Dutchy of Czarist Russia. He had a Finnish father and a Swedish mother. He studied in Helsinki and fought with the White Guards in the war of independence from Russia. His early work was mainly traditional styled houses but as he got more experience and traveled to Italy he became more interested in the new rational international style. I did a Spanish stamp with one of their architects on a similar journey here, https://the-philatelist.com/2020/03/02/spain-1976-we-can-now-again-cellebrate-the-rational-architect-who-irrationally-ran-off/    . Rationalist architecture was very much in evidence with the Paimio Sanitarium with it’s blocky shape, minimum decoration, and ribbon windows. There was however much done to make things more comfortable for the patients. The rooms had double occupancy but featured special no glare lighting and colors to help with sleeping. Each room had two wash basins of special design to be nearly silent. At the end of each floor there was a large balcony where even bedridden patients could be wheeled to see the sunshine. The staff that lived on site had walking trails through nearby forests. None of this may sound earth shattering to modern ears, but this was 1930. Image the horrors of the typical sanitarium then.

As Mr. Aalto aged he understood the limitations of having all new construction being undecorated blocks of concrete. His later work had more undulations in the designs and he worked on laminating wood so that it could better be used in situations with curves. That of course made the wood less natural and there is a forced quality to some of his later work that leave it less distinguished. In his early years he teamed with his fellow architect wife Aino but after she died in 1949, Alvar remarried a junior female architect with the firm named Elissa who was perhaps not able to support his work at the top level. It is of course normal for the creative to do their best work when they are young.

The Paimo Sanitarium still exists but thankfully is no longer needed by tuberculosis patients. It was a general hospital starting in the early 1960s. Today it is a physical rehabilitation center for children.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast Finland. Many new countries get bogged down in old rivalry and do not take the time to invest in creating a new distinct future, Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Stamps sure can last along time. When this stamp was new in 1950, the DC6 was the new, fast, almost intercontinental airliner. By this version of the stamp in 1963, the DC-6 was out of date and just serving low cost charter Finnish airlines. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

Some might argue that an attractive image of an airplane over a winter wonderland is timeless. That the aircraft was old and not in domestic service only matters to plane nerds. To which I would point out that the stamp required two redrawings over the years to account for currency changes. Finland did not make this mistake on their next airmail issue. Instead the mistake was never making another airmail stamp.

Todays stamp is issue AP5, a 3 Markka stamp issued by Finland on October 10th, 1963. There are two versions of the this last version of this stamp with either 13 or 16 tiny lines through the zero number. My eyesight, even with magnification cannot tell which mine is. Thus there is mystery as to whether according to the Scott catalog my stamp is worth 30 or 40 cents used.

The DC-6 was launched in 1946 as the next development of the smaller DC-4. The plane could fly 300 mph, carried about 60 passengers, and introduced pressurization to enhance passenger comfort. It was almost intercontinental. It could fly nonstop from the east coast of the United States to Europe. From Europe to the USA facing head on the Atlantic’s westerly winds, required a fuel stop.

An early option was a sleeper version, where the daytime seats fold and a bed comes out where the overhead compartments would be. This version can be picked out by a few small circular windows at a higher level. The plane does not have that and may be of the longer freighter version. Some of those had passenger windows like the plane on the stamp, some did not. By 1960, most of the 704 DC-6s built were operating as cargo planes in the third world or in the USA as a firefighting water bombers.

You might notice that the DC-6 on the stamp has no livery. The model was not in service with the Finnish Air Force or Finnair, then known as Aero O/Y. It is not unusual for mail bags to go on foreign airlines, but not something you want to brag about on your stamps. This lack of DC-6s in Finland was rectified in 1961 when two now defunct vacation charter airlines, Karair and Finlantic took used passenger examples. Finland is still not done with the DC-6. A nose section of a plane formally in Canadian service has been restored in Finland and put on static display. Colorado has Finland beat, it was after all an American plane. One is used there statically as a kindergarden classroom.

Well my drink is empty and so I will wait till tomorrow when there is another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.