A to Z Blogging Challenge: B is for Belarus

(My theme for April's A to Z blogging challenge is postcards. If you want, read my intro post).

Belarus, officially called the Republic of Belarus, is an interesting phenomenon when it comes to exchanging postcards. It is considered Europe's last dictatorship, but the country has an amazing number of people who are interested in exchanging postcards globally ... And, it even has official Postcrossing postage stamps (Postcrossing is the  oldest and largest postcard exchange site in the world) that were issued by the Belarus post office.

The issuance is a significant deal because only 16 countries have official Postcrossing postage stamps (Belarus has at least two, that I know of because I have those two). I checked guidelines for the USPS to see what it would take to get one. In short, an act of Congress and a miracle as their guidelines are very strict.

Anyway, according to the stats on Postcrossing.com, Belarus is the 8th most popular country on Postcrossing. What does this mean? Out of 9.5 million people in the country, almost 29,000 exchange postcards and over 2 million postcards have been sent as of the date of this post. In 2010, for every 100,000 inhabitants of Belarus, there were 47 people in the country who exchanged postcards.

To put it into perspective: The USA ranks 31st. It has over 323 million people and over 66,000 people on Postcrossing have sent 4.7 million postcards as of the date of this post. In 2010, 10 people out of 100,000 in the USA exchanged postcards.

Anyway, I chose this card to highlight from the 12 postcards I received from Belarus because I like castles. As you can see, it depicts the Kosava Castle. It was built in the early 1800s, so it’s not that old by European standards. It was damaged during both world wars and has 12 towers that denote each month of the year. At one time, it had a glass floor, under which bright fish swam.