The First Post Card in the World

We used to aproach mailboxes with joy and hope that we had received a long-awaited letter, a beautiful postcard or a colorful greeting card. Those times are gone, the boxes are full of bills or advertising flyers. Soon there will be no more bills as well, as it is increasingly moving to on-line transactions, which is very good, but it's not good since there are no
more these beautiful postcards that were able to bring joy. That's why I would like to remind ourselves about some old forgotten times and interesting, little-known data.

I recently found out that the first postcard ever printed and sent by post was written in Cyrillic, except for the address. It was sent from Vienna to Sombor.

The lieutenant of the Austro-Hungarian army, Petar Manojlovic, was a close friend of our famous and dear Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj, and he often visited the editorial board of the satire-political newspaper "Zmaj" based in Vienna. On one occasion, he proposed to uncle Jova the idea of ​​creating illustrated postcards, for easier correspondence with readers. After the agreement, they started making postcards in the copper-cut, which was made by the Vienna master Waldheim according to the paintings by Manojlović.

At the beginning of 1871, the first volume was handed over to the editorial staff of the magazine, and on 19th of May 1871, postcard from Vienna was post and sent to Sombor for the first time in history. It was addressed to Manojlovic's uncle, a prominent Sombor lawyer. Since political turmoil in this region was always turbulent, the lawyer was scared of possible negative consequences and refused to accept the postcard. When he saw the image of the minarets of Constantinople, the Moscow dome and the background of the steamer with the flag of the Principality of Serbia, he immediately returned to the sender.

Today, this postcard has enormous philatelic value and is owned by a Belgian collector.Sometimes postcards were a real little masterpiece, and it's nice that many are preserved even as collector trophies.

By Jasminka S.

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J.J.Zmaj
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