Karty Derzhavnye
Karty Derzhavnye (Sovereign cards) with artwork by S. Zaitsev, Russia, 1997.
Karty Derzhavnye fortune-telling cards were published in 1997 by the Kombinat Tsvetnoi Pechati, St. Petersburg. It is sometimes also translated as “Imperial”. The full pack contains 56 cards (52 cards + 2 jokers + 2 double-sided information/description cards). The author of the deck is S. Spirov and the artist is S. Zaitsev. The creators of the deck have incorporated into the pack the popular fortune-telling system “Fate and Will” and the “Pyramid of Success” solitaire as its basis.
The clubs and spades have a blue/turquoise background while the hearts and diamonds have a red background. The court cards differ in each suit, but the pip cards in each suit only have one background symbol: hearts show Peter the Great in a heart-shaped frame; diamonds show the two-headed eagle in a diamond frame; clubs show a bronze angel, while spades display a royal crown in a spade-shaped frame. The two extra cards explain how to arrange and interpret the cards for fortune-telling.
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Above: cards from ‘Karty Derzhavnye’ (Sovereign cards) published by the Kombinat Tsvetnoi Pechati, St. Petersburg, 1997. 52 cards + 2 jokers + 2 double-sided information/description cards.
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By Peter Burnett
Member since July 27, 2022
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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