TurulBélyeg: kennisbank

The wine-red 50-fillér stamp of Hungary’s 1904 Turul issue brings together ink chemistry, collector speculation and a destruction that never took place. What looks like a simple colour variety followed a remarkable path from the printing works to collectors’ albums.

In November 1904, the State Printing Works ran out of the colouring materials used for the familiar shade of the 50-fillér stamp. A new mixture was used to print 4,700 sheets, which matched the previous colour both when wet and when finished. On 14 November, 2,000 sheets were sent to the stamp stores of six postal directorates; the remaining 2,700 stayed at the printing works.

Collectors noticed the wine-red stamps in January 1905. Suspecting a printing error, they began speculating in them. An investigation in March found that exposure to air had oxidised the originally brownish colour, turning it dark wine-red. The postal authorities ordered the immediate withdrawal of the affected stamps and the return of stocks to the State Printing Works. Some stamps had already entered postal circulation.

The returned stock awaited destruction, but events took another course. According to the monograph, it became public in early 1931 that the Post Office’s Stamp Bureau had already sold 10% of the remaining stock by 1930. At a public auction at the end of 1930, a stamp dealer bought a further 80%; the Bureau retained 10%.

The release of so many unused stamps greatly reduced the value of the wine-red variety. Writing about conditions in its own period, the monograph states that the original-colour 50-fillér stamps, which remained in circulation, were worth roughly thirty to forty times as much as the oxidised variety. This is a historical comparison, not a present-day price ratio.

The story also helps explain how a genuinely postally used wine-red example can be worth more than a mint, never-hinged one: large unused stocks reached collectors, while examples used before withdrawal survived through a different route. This is not a price guarantee for every stamp; condition, cancellation, watermark and the precise variety all matter.

The surviving material also yielded previously unrecorded numeral watermarks for this denomination and a sheet with an inverted watermark. The wine-red 50-fillér Turul is therefore more than a colour variation: it is a small document of printing practice, postal use and the collecting market.

Source: A magyar bélyegek monográfiája (Monograph of Hungarian Stamps), volume IV, page 146 and the following passage.