As a sign of tribute and appreciation for the “The Prince of the Mountains” (“crăișorul munților”), the Romanian Parliament adopted the Law no. 223 of 2023 establishing the year 2024 as the “Year of Avram Iancu”, for the 200th anniversary of the birth of the revolutionary Avram Iancu.
To mark this historic event, Romfilatelia is releasing on Tuesday, February 27th this year an anniversary issue with the generic title Avram Iancu, 200 Years since Birth, consisting of a postage stamp and a perforated souvenir sheet, which have the face values of Lei 13.00 and Lei 33.00 respectively.
The drawing reproduced on the postage stamp of the issue represents the face of Avram Iancu, in a conception belonging to Octavian Beu. In the graphics of the souvenir sheet, next to the portrait, reproduced after a painting by Mișu Popp, the postage stamp associates the image of the “Avram Iancu” memorial house with a portrait reproduced after a lithograph by Ion Costande.
Avram Iancu singularized himself in the history of Transylvania. At only 24 years of age, he had become, in the unanimous acceptance of the people of Transylvania, “Craiul munţilor” (“The Prince of the Mountains”). Intellectuals such as Simion Bărnuțiu, Gheorghe Barițiu or Alexandru Papiu Laurian were in dialogue with him, expressing their hope: “This young man will take the nation forward”.
After the villages in the Apuseni Mountains were attacked, Avram Iancu intervened and managed, from the fall of 1848 until 1849, to make the land of the Apuseni Mountains a “Romanian Country”. He organized a resistance against the Hungarian attacks, but after the intervention of the Austrian and tsarist troops he had to surrender.
Disappointed, he retired to the silence of the mountains like a wanderer in the world. He met his end at Baia de Criș. He was buried with national funerals on September 13th, 1872 in Panteonul Moţilor (the Moţilor Pantheon) in Țebea, near “Gorunul lui Horea” (“Horea’s sessile oak”). Hundreds of moţi have arrived on horseback, from Vidra de Sus (the place where Avram Iancu had come into the world), as early as September 11th, to wake him. The Romanian Telegraph publication presented the text: “His life in its entirety will remain an honest mirror of our national life.”
“Avram Iancu’s name soon became a powerful symbol of national freedom, so that his official declaration as Hero of the Romanian Nation, on November 17th, 2016, represented only the validation of an indisputable truth”, says His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel.
Romfilatelia thanks the representatives of the Romanian Academy Library, the National Museum of Romanian History, the National Museum of the Union in Alba Iulia and the Museum of Dacian and Roman Civilization in Deva, for the documentary support granted to the development of this postage stamps issue.
