On June 3, a PCWCS dedicated to the 175th Birth Anniversary of Aleksander Grigoriev, a botanist, an ethnographer, an Honorary Member of the Russian Geographical Society, was put into postal circulation in the Geographic Projects of Russia series

Alexander Grigoriev (1848-1908) was a Russian botanist and ethnographer, the Secretary of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (1883-1903).

Alexander Grigoriev was born in 1848 in St. Petersburg. In 1870, he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the St. Petersburg University. Since 1871, he taught anatomy and physiology of plants at the St. Petersburg Practical Technical Institute. In 1876, he accompanied Professor N. Wagner to the White Sea. The results of his observations of the physical phenomena of the White and Murmansk Seas were published in the Proceedings of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society.

In 1878, he was admitted as a Full Member of the Geographical Society, and in 1879, the Society sent him on an official trip on board steam schooner Nordenshöld with the task to circumvent the continent of Asia from the south and come to the rescue of Baron A. Nordenshöld, who wintered at that time with the Vega steamer off the coast of Siberia. The schooner took the bottom near the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Taking advantage of the involuntary stop in Japan, Grigoriev lent himself to ethnographic researches on the Ainu.

On his return to Russia in 1880, he donated his assembled collections: zoological - to the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and ethnographic - to the Geographical Society. In the same year, he was elected as the Secretary of the Ethnography Department of the Geographical Society. In 1887, he participated in the expedition of the Geographical Society to Novaya Zemlya, where he assembled nature-historical collections, which he later transferred to the Museum of the Academy of Sciences. In 1889, he was one of the Society's delegates at the geographical congress in Paris.

The last Grigoriev's major venture was organization of the Tibetan expedition of G. Tsybikov (1899-1902) and preparation for the publication of the description of this trip, A Buddhist Pilgrim at the Shrines of Tibet.

In the last years of his life, Grigoriev was a member of the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and Eastern Asia in historical, archaeological, linguistic and ethnographic aspects.

The main illustration shows a portrait of A. Grigoriev, the background provides his photographs of a baggage-man and a temple in ancient Kamakur, as well as a RGS logo; the commemorative stamp features symbolic images of geographical projects.

In addition to the issue of the postcard with a commemorative stamp, JSC Marka produced special cancels for Moscow and St. Petersburg.


Design Artist: S. Kapranov.
Quantity: 5.5 thousand cards.

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