Slovak Olympic stamp. (source: TASR)
IN CONNECTION with the 22nd Winter Olympics in Sochi, an exhibition called Winter Sports and Winter Olympics on Slovak Postal Stamps is taking place in the Postal Museum at Partizánska cesta 9 in Banská Bystrica until March 31. It presents a 20-year overview of winter sport-themed Slovak philatelic works.
The core of the exhibition consists of stamps issued for the Winter Olympics. Stamps for “Lillehammer 1994, Nagano 1998, Salt Lake City 2002, Torino 2006, Vancouver 2010, and also … the Winter Olympics in Sochi ... can be seen in this exhibition,” Slovak Post spokesperson Stanislava Pondelová told the SITA newswire.
Other winter sport competitions are featured on the stamps as well, like the 2011 World Cup in Bratislava and Košice, the 2001 European Championship in figure skating and the 1997 biathlon World Championship.
Another group of stamps shows achievements of specific Slovak athletes, mainly hockey players, and late, exceptional personalities like Ondrej Nepela and Pavol Demitra. The exhibition offers 13 issues of stamps in the form of designs, drafts, first-day covers, memorial sheets, stamp booklets, sticking sheets, etc., as well as books and collections of Slovak coins and euro-coins minted for the Winter Olympics in Torino and Vancouver.
“Our country rose to fame thanks to many outstanding personalities of winter athletic disciplines,” Pondelová said. “Their success, as well as big events organised in winter sports in Slovakia, make it regularly into the plan of issuances of Slovak postal stamps.”
