Latvijas Pasts has released a new stamp and a cover in honour of the 250th anniversary of Garlieb Helwig Merkel (Garlībs Helvigs Merķelis), one of the most prominent representatives of enlightenment ideas in the Baltics. The first day cancellation of the stamp is scheduled to take place at the Riga Latvian Society House at 13 Merķeļa Street, Riga, from 9 AM to 7 PM on the 1st of November 2019, which is the day of his birth.
The print run of the new stamp is 100,000 copies and its face value is € 1.42, which corresponds to the cost of sending a registered Class A letter within Latvia. The release of the stamp is accompanied by the issue of a special cover with a print run of 1,000 copies. The philatelic releases have been designed by the artist Lilija Dinere.
In the visual presentation of the stamp and the cover the artist used materials from the Misiņš Library of the Academic Library of the University of Latvia: illustrations featured in Merkel’s most famous work Latvians, Particularly in Vidzeme, at the End of the Philosophical Century (1796), Vidzeme’s Ancient Times (1798–1799), Vanems Imanta (1802), Free Latvians and Estonians (1820) and Latvian translation (1905) of the book Latvians.
G.H. Merkel (1769–1850) was a Baltic German writer, publicist and one of the most prominent promoters of enlightenment ideas in the Baltics. Merkel’s work significantly contributed to the abolition of serfdom in Latvia, and his views influenced the development of Latvian social thought and literature in the 19th and 20th centuries.
