The Åland Islands is an archipelago province at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea belonging to Finland. It is autonomous, demilitarised and is the only monolingually Swedish-speaking region in Finland.…
Albania, 1994
The light blue definitive card manufactured and supplied by Urmet is well known among collectors and usually considered the first issue of Albania. But less known indeed is that another card was used previously, some…
Andorra, 1991
Phonecards coming from this small European Country are highly popular among collectors especially for their beauty and low mintages. The first one, a chip card of which 20,000 cards were issued, commemorated the 4th Games…
Austria, 1980
Austria always used the optical cards of Landis & Gyr for public telephony, and commercialized many different ones, both public and private. The first Austrian telephone card was yellow, without the white band, and with…
Belarus, 1994
In Belarus, two companies issued telephone cards: the Beltelecom government company, which used the Urmet system and then, from 1995, the chip card system; and BelCel, which instead relied on the magnetic technology of the…
Belgium, 1977
Belgium was the second country in the world to issue telephone cards, after Italy, and for many years the system used was that provided by the Swiss Landis & Gyr. The first cards were two…
Bulgaria, 1988
Following some experiments started in 1981, the first series of public telephone cards saw the light in 1988. They were four magnetic cards, with values of 1, 2, 5 and 10 leva, with the same…
Croatia, 1991
We all know the beautiful Croatian cards with chip, but the first cards, in use from 1991 to 1994, were magnetic cards supplied by GPT. The first one had the Croatian colors on white background,…
Cyprus, 1988
Produced by the English GPT, the first card used on the island was a complimentary card, representing a satellite antenna, with 1CYPA code and 10,000 run. Shortly thereafter, a series of three ordinary green and…
Czech Republic, 1993
On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia split peacefully into two new countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Telecom Praha, the Czechoslovak national company, which had already issued several cards before the split, continued to operate in…
