 Postal
stamps have been in use since Libya was part of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish
stamps were used without any overprint showing their origin or locality.
Letters with stamps that had been mailed out of the region could only be
identified by their return address.
The early local postal outlets were in the form of small agencies
that set up shop near international consulates and navigation companies
at major ports. Since the services of these outfits were unreliable, Italy
established the first main postal outlets in order to ensure some sort
of a communication link to its residents in the Ottoman colony in this
part of North Africa in 1869.
The following stamp collection is divided into two main categories: Pre-independence stamps that were issued by the colonial Italian government, and Post-Independence Libyan stamps. We are in need of your comments on the subject and wish you enjoy this piece of our history. |
Italian
stamps went into circulation at the beginning of 1909 and were in use until
the Italian occupation in 1911. The original stamps had overprinted names
of the postal outlets, Tripoli di Barbaria and Benghazi di Barbaria. The
name Libia was also overprinted on Italian stamps between 1912 and 1922.
Stamps bearing the overprints of Cyrenaica, Fezzan, and Tripolitania were
also in use until 1932 when proper stamps of these regions were issued
and remained in use until 1936. Italian stamps without any overprint were
also in use until 1943.
It
was not until independence in 1951 and the unification of the three regions
of Libya under the name The United Kingdom of Libya, that stamps commemorating
Libyan subjects began to appear in print.