This art piece pictures the crests of three mining towns, Banská Bystrica, Banská Stiavnica and Kremnica. When was the idea to make this picture born? We attended last September the “2023 PostEurop Philatelic Forum” organized by PostEurope, the organization of the European postal organisations. It was Mr Botond Szebeny, General Secretary of PostEurop who invited us and offered the possibility for me to exhibit five of my pictures and for my husband to make a presentation on my art activity. Our friendship with both Mr Thanawat Amnajanan,  Chief of United Nations Postal Administration and Mr Martin Vanco,   Head of Postal Philatelic Service and Postal Museum of Slovakia started here.

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Only some days passed by after we came home and a large box of stamps arrived from Slovakia. The stamps were still denominated in Slovakian Korona, the currency which was withdrawn after Slovakia introduced the Euro. We received in the same time an invitation to make an exhibition in September 2024 in Banská Bystrica, where the Slovakian Postal Museum is situated.  It is my habit to make a special picture to every exhibition on a topic kind to the local visitors. I hit upon the topic very quickly, it was mining. But how to feature this industrial activity? I decided finally to make the crest of three close to each other mining towns of the region each painted on a mine-waggon filled with silver, gold and copper. To paint the picture, I used stamps of several countries including those from Hungary, England and Poland. The most difficult was to feature the bulks of the waggons. Eventually I painted them by using stamps figuring Olympic medals. The background of the picture and also the wheels of the waggons were painted by using the stamps I received from Slovakia. The ones what I used for the background ware stamps presenting an art piece of the Slovakian artist Koloman Sokol featuring two miners being exhausted from the hard and dangerous work they did.  

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To conclude my comments, I quote a few lines of the miners’ anthem born in the end of the 19th century in Banská Stiavnica (the text this time is n Slovakian):

Good luck to God above, death is upon us, 
the shaft is calling, the lamp wick is already smoldering.
Deadly elements of the mine,
they hurt our palms
.
To the heavens rise to paradise, to paradise,
(Good luck to God, give us, give us, give us)