About the Postal Museum

History of the Postal Museum

The Postal Museum was set up on 18 December 1918 as a body whose collections on postal history were to witness the independent and autonomous status of the Czech and Slovak nation. The first Czechoslovak postage stamp, the famous "Prague Castle" designed by Alfons Mucha, appeared on the same day.

In the early stages the museum staff took every effort to gather collections. A decade later the museum opened its first exposition on the ground floor of the Karolinum building, the historic seat of Charles University in Prague. But soon after the opening the exposition had to move again because the university needed the rooms for its own purposes. A new venue was found in the premises of former St Gabriel's Monastery in the Prague's district of Smíchov and the museum re-opened its exposition to public in February 1933. The highlights were carriages, coaches, sleighs, and even an aircraft in the collection of transport vehicles.

The occupation of Czechoslovakia broke the successful development of the museum. The museum was shut down in September 1944 and had to wait for its re-opening until May 1945.

Soon it had to close again: the communist regime preferred philately to postal history. This led to the creation of a permanent exposition on postage stamps opened in December 1953 and cancellation of the expositions on postal history, tele- and radiocommunications.

Po únoru 1948 přišlo další uzavření. Přednost dostala filatelie, dějiny poštovnictví byly opomíjeny. Výsledkem byl vznik stálé expozice poštovních známek v prosinci 1953. Sály, které se věnovaly dějinám pošty, telekomunikací a radiokomunikací, byly zrušeny.

A new atmosphere arose in the 1960s. An exposition on postal history was opened in the former Cistercian monastery in Vyšší Brod in 1976. The museum also found its new venue in Prague - a baroque building adorned with mural paintings by Josef Navrátil. The opening ceremony took place in August 1988.

The split of the Czechoslovak federation brought further changes. The Czechoslovak collections were to be divided between the Czech and Slovak republics.

In 2002 Postal Museum's collection was proclaimed part of the cultural heritage of the Czech Republic.

Postal Museum's logo

The Postal Museum has been using its own logo since 2010.

Membership in organizations

The Postal Museum is a member of the following national or international organisations:

• Asociace muzeí a galerií České republiky (Association of Museums and Galleries of the Czech Republic, AMG ČR),
• International Association of Transport and Communications Museums (IATM),
• International Council of Museums (ICOM), an NGO maintaining formal relations with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
• Conference of European Communication Museums (CECOMM),
• Mitteleuropäische Union Technischer Museen (Central European Union of Technical Museums, MUT),
• Club de Monte-Carlo de l'Elite de la Philatelie.

Postal history

History of the Czech postal service

The beginning of an organised and state-controlled transmission of messages in the Czech lands dates back to 1526 when Archduke Ferdinand was elected King of Bohemia. Ferdinand ordered the establishment of a first postal route between Prague and Vienna. Routes with stations for exchange of courier horses started to connect political and trade centres. In 1743, at the very beginning of her rule, Maria Theresa had a state postal monopoly created, covering the transport of both mail and passengers. The condition of road building and the range of available service gradually improved. In the early 19th century, Europe was hit by the Industrial Revolution. It boosted the speed of everything, including mail and passenger transportation. Technical inventions played the essential role. Telephone, invented in the second stage of the Industrial Revolution, became one of the major contributions. The era culminated in the invention of wireless transmission of messages, or radiotelegraphy.

The creation of an independent state in 1918 brought about changes in the system of organisation and control of postal operations. The government set up a ministry of post and telegraph offices. The Czechoslovak Post was established in the early 1925 as a state-owned enterprise. During the Nazi occupation, the Post was fully dependent on the German post office ministry and the protectorate administration. After the communist regime came to power, the Czechoslovak Post became a ‘national enterprise'. Postal service was gradually moved aside and replaced by tele- and radiocommunications as a propaganda tool. The post-1989 changes led to the division of postal and telecommunication services. When the Czech Republic became an independent state on 1 January 1993, the Czech Post was established as a state-owned enterprise with independent financing. This allowed the Post to further develop the tradition of the interwar state-owned enterprise Czechoslovak Post and to prove the sense of its existence in the conditions of market economy.

History of exhibitions

The Postal Museum held its first short-time exhibition as early as 1936. A breakthrough series of short-time exhibitions came in the early 1990s. Exhibitions on graphic and stamp design included works by many Czech and Slovak graphic artists and engravers, such as Adolf Born, Cyril Bouda, Oldřich Kulhánek, Karel Franta. Exhibitions on postal history, e.g. Mail service in the ghetto Terezín, Post in the Rudolfinian era, also attracted large numbers of visitors. Exhibitions on foreign stamp design, held in cooperation with partner postal museums in Slovakia, France and Finland, were similarly attractive.