10/16/2023
Certificate of appreciation to the owner of the first Serbian postcard
The Director of the Post of Serbia, Zoran Đorđević, officially presented a certificate of appreciation to Mr. Ivan Bogavčević, a prominent philatelist and art historian from Zagreb, the founder of the Institute for Valuation and Processing of Postcards, who generously provided the Post of Serbia with the first Serbian postcard from his private philatelic collection, for the motif of the philatelic issue on the occasion of the Stamp Day.
For a long time, it was believed that the creator of the first postcard in the world was a certain bookseller Schwartz from the Rhine region, but in 1964 the postcard "Zmaj (Dragon)" was discovered and it was soon confirmed that the creator of the oldest postcard in the world was officer Petar Manojlović from Szenttamás, today's Srbobran, who created the postcard made in cooperation with Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, then editor of the newspaper "Zmaj".
It was created using the technique of coloured copper plate etching by the Viennese typographer Rudolf Schirer von Weidheim, while the artistic solution – a drawing of a mythical creature of a dragon with outstretched wings, and depictions of Constantinople and Moscow between which a steamer sails under the Serbian flag - was made by geodetic officer Petar Manojlović.
The first Serbian postcard is part of our cultural heritage, and since only one copy has survived to this day, it represents a world rarity. It was last sold to the current owner at an auction in 2009 in Salzburg.