A real oddity from the Philatelic Crusaders for Peace

This is one of the strangest covers I've seen in 50 years of collecting.  It describes itself as a "unique art card" and it's packed with stamps from Egypt and facsimile stamps from other countries, handstamped with all kinds of religious and political slogans and other markings.  This item is about 8x10 inches on heavy card stock.

On the front there's a facsimile stamp to save the monuments of Nubia, again with multiple markings.  Like a premonition of the many strange markings on the back, this one stamp was overprinted with "Worship God", "The End of the Begining" (sic) and "GOLD + WATER = PAY".



Here's the back side:

 Finally, a close-up of the address box:

This huge card was sent by "the Bank of Arts, Philatelic Crusaders for Peace" in Alexandria, sponsored by Constantin St. Tsirimonis.  It's addressed to "the Honorable Walt Disney" at "Disneyland Park, Anaheim, Los Angeles, California, which is a bit funny since Anaheim is not in Los Angeles.  The vast assortment of slogans are amazing, almost hypnotic.  I can only wonder what the creator was trying to say.  Some are almost apocalyptic, from a group that was crusading for peace?

It looks like a philatelic creation but some of the Egypt stamps are tied by actual cancels, so maybe this was mailed?  I can only guess at a value.  I can't imagine there are too many of these out there.  

There are some examples discussed on TheStampForum.  Scroll down to Feb 27, 2025.

The forum posts mention an article published in the Association of British Philatelic Societies journal in Autumn 2020 (Vol 27. No. 3), which you can download as a PDF here.

Another article mentioned was in the British Thematic Association's journal (Vol. 35, No. 4).

A post from 2 Nov 2025 (bottom of the page) shows some unused postcards from the Philatelic Crusade for Peace.  Whether this was ever a valid charity or a real organization is hard to tell.   I have yet to find a writer who could find any information about Mr. Tsirimonis.  As an art project, this is a truly obscure classic.  But as someone who loves a good mystery, this is going to bother me for a long time.  I will probably look for others ... although our local stamp show just shut down, so there are far fewer boxes to pick through.

I have the card itself listed on HipStamp right now, in case you want to see a much larger photo you can scroll over.


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