Karty Lyubvi
Karty lyubvi Slavyanskie (Slavonic love cards) and Karty lyubvi Starinnye (Ancient love cards).
These are a pair of fortune telling cards. Both packs are patience size, contain 36 cards, have the same design on the card reverse, and come with an identical guide to their use and interpretation of the different combinations of cards. See the guide►
Karty Lyubvi Slavyanskie (Slavonic love cards)
The Slavonic cards depict images of bygone Russia: horsemen, knights, young maidens, and medieval scenes and characters each representing an emotion or element of fortune such as news, money, a strong man, success, family happiness. The aim is to explain and predict the subject’s fortunes in affairs of the heart.
Karty Lyubvi Starinnye (Ancient love cards)
The Ancient love cards depict figures and scenes from antiquity and the classical and medieval world, including tarot images.
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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