History of the Postal Museum
The Postal Museum was set up by decision of the Minister of Post and Telegraph Offices on December 18th, 1918 as a body whose collections on postal history were to witness the independent and autonomous status of the Czech and Slovak nation. With the first Czechoslovak postage stamp, the famous "Prague Castle" designed by Alfons Mucha, appearing on the same day, December 18th, 1918 became a symbolic day for the Post.
In the early stages the museum staff, led by the first director of the Museum, Václav Dragoun, took every effort to gather collections and open a permanent exposition. Although archival documents arrived under the Austrian-Czech agreement on transfer of official documents, other things of Czech provenience remained in the postal museum in Vienna and were to be replaced by acquisitions purchased, donated or transferred from Czech post offices.
A decade later, on November 17th, 1928, the museum opened its first exposition on the ground floor of the Karolinum building, the historic seat of Charles University in Prague. The three rooms held an attractive and informative exposition created by six members of the museum staff and designed by the successor to Václav Dragoun, the famous writer Jiří Karásek of Lvovice (museum director since 1926).
Shortly after the opening of the exposition it had to move again because the university needed the rooms for its own purposes. A new venue was found by lucky coincidence so that the exposition could move to the former St Gabriel's Monastery in Prague-Smíchov. The late 19th century building of the monastery was built in the pseudo-romanesque style of the Beuron Art School.
In 1933, Jiří Karásek was replaced in his office by the chief post secretary Alois Lustig. The top priority of the new director was to build a new exposition which would overcome the old one cramped in the small rooms in the Karolinum. The new exposition was opened on February 3rd, 1933 in nine spacious rooms of the total area of 1,025m2. The highlights were carriages, coaches, sledges and even an aircraft in the collection of transport vehicles.
The occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 broke the successful development of the museum. In a short time it became a propaganda tool of the Nazi Germany. Forced to cooperate with the German Postal Museum in Berlin and its Vienna branch, the museum had to present imperial and protectorate stamps. Due to the war events, the museum was finally closed on September 1st, 1944, and had to wait for its re-opening until the end of the war in May 1945.
The first post-war exposition, opened on May 19th, 1947 in a reduced scope, had to be closed again in autumn 1948 because of the new political orientation of the country. Postal history was to be replaced by philately.
The opening of the permanent exhibition of postage stamps on December 22nd, 1953, as well as the simultaneous process of closing of exhibitions on postal, telecommunications and radiocommunications history, soon confirmed these changes. This was the main cause of the museum's stagnation in the 1950s and early 1960s.
The 2nd half of the 1960s brought new atmosphere. In 1966, the museum set up a department of postal history documentation and the team started cataloguing the not yet sorted collections. A large exposition on postal history in the Czech lands and Slovakia was opened on July 2nd, 1976 in the building of the former Cistercian monastery in Vyšší Brod, a small town in South Bohemia.
The next step in the process of consolidating the museum was to find a building where the Prague headquarters could be based. The building finally obtained by the museum was a historic house in the Prague Conservation Area, built in the baroque style and decorated with murals by Josef Navrátil, which was used until the late 19th century as the residence of Prague New Town's millers and townsmen. Following a demanding reconstruction, the new headquarters were opened at the ceremony on August 26th, 1988.
New opportunities came with the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1989. In 1991, the museum staff created a space in the building of the Prague headquarters big enough for short-time exhibitions. The series of regular exhibitions is still continuing with an average of six events per year. The themes of the events, organized by the museum alone or in cooperation with local or foreign partner museums, are leading Czech and foreign stamp designs, postal and philatelic history.
The formation of the independent Czech Republic together with the splitting of postal service from telecommunications and radiocommunications services (both events taking place on January 1st, 1993) brought further changes. The Postal Museum became a part of the newly established state-owned enterprise Czech Post and started dividing its collections between the Czech side and its Slovak counterpart.
In the late 1990s, the museum started digitalising its collections on postal history. Pursuant to the new museum and gallery legislation harmonised with the EU standards, the museum's collections were entered into the Central Registry of Collections of the Czech Ministry of Culture as part of the Czech cultural heritage.