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500th Anniversary to Reformation

Set
GBP £0.74
First Day Cover
GBP £1.30
About 500th Anniversary to Reformation

To mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation of the Church,Latvijas Pasts has released a postage stamp dedicated to this event. The first day cancellation of the stamp is scheduled to take place in Riga post office No. 50 located in the shopping mall Origo, 2 Stacijas laukums, from 7:30 AM to 8 PM on the 27th of October 2017.

The print run of the stamp Reformation – 500 is 200,000 copies and its face value is €0.85, which corresponds to the cost of sending a regular Class A letter to any country of the world outside the European Union. The release of the stamp is accompanied by the issue of a special cover with a print run of 1,500 copies. The new philatelic releases have been designed by the artist Jānis Strupulis.

The stamp features two personalities who are closely linked with the Reformation: Martin Luther, an ideologist of church reforms and Andreas Knöpken (also known as Knopke and Knopius), the initiator of the Reformation movement in Riga, which was a Livonian town at that time. The stamp and the first day postmark also depict the Luther rose, a widely recognised symbol for Lutheranism.

The teachings of the pastor, theologian and professor M. Luther encouraged the Reformation, becoming the basis for both the Lutheran and Protestant traditions and, to a large extent, the common cultural-historical foundation of the Western civilisation. The movement emerged in the 16th century with the aim to implement the reforms of the European Catholic Church, breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, the church split with the formation of several new denominations that still exist today: Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Reformed Church, etc.

A number of authors mention Livonia as one of the first regions where the ideas of M. Luther spread outside German territory. The Reformation centre in Livonia was Riga.