License plates trace history of world in chaos

For years, a bizarre monument lured tourists to a tiny village in a disputed zone of the Caucasus: a wall adored with thousands of vintage Azerbaijani license plates issued during Soviet rule. The monument, which inflamed passions in both Azerbaijan and its archenemy Armenia, had been constructed by Armenian authorities using plates taken off of civilian and military vehicles abandoned by Azerbaijan in the early 1990s following Armenia’s effective capture of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Sadly, I never got to see this one-of-a-kind shrine for myself. That’s because in this place as  elsewhere, the seemingly innocent license plates—there’s just a little slice of bureaucracy! —get strangely wrapped up in histories that are often chaotic and violent. They sometimes tell the story.

In September 2023, after a long-running military campaign, Azerbaijan managed to drive all 120,000 ethnic Armenians out of Karabakh— also known as the de facto Republic of Artsakh—and began taking down monuments built during Artsakh’s short-lived existence. On Nov. 7, 2023, Azerbaijan’s authoritarian president, Ilham Aliyev, ordered the plates to be destroyed, along with the wall displaying them.

In response, the Armenian nonprofit agency Monument Watch charged that the removal of this  site “is an attempt by Azerbaijan to eradicate all the artifacts that hold memories” of Armenia’s 1990s victory and—perhaps stating the obvious—added that Aliyev’s endorsement of it “underscores a clear state policy aimed at erasing symbols of Artsakh’s independence.”

It wouldn’t be the first time in history license plates inflamed national passions. Almost from the moment automobiles and trucks appeared on the face of the Earth, so did the numbered tags—issued first by municipalities and later by states and countries—that identified each one as unique.

As a lifelong license-plate enthusiast, I’ve amassed 640 examples; most are made of tin, but plastic, porcelain, fiberglass and even wooden plates are also represented, going back as far as 1906. A few are displayed on the walls of my Tel Aviv office, but most are stored in six plastic crates under my desk—waiting for the day we can buy an apartment with enough wall space to hang them all. Ironically, for that I may have to sell the finest of these plates.

That obsession began with my father, Morton B. Luxner, who died in 2004 at the age of 86.

The earliest plate in father’s collection was “YB-87” — issued by the state of New York in 1953. It was the plate my father had on his 1950 Ford when he, my mom and my two sisters drove from Brooklyn to Florida to begin a new life in the Sunshine State where I was born. Every year, upon receiving new Florida plates in the mail, he’d proudly nail the old ones up on a wall in the garage.

Eventually, my dad assembled quite a collection of colorful plates, all of which captured my attention. Years later, but long before I knew what anything was worth, I foolishly traded away two of the best examples in my collection: a Florida “Miccosukkee Indian 44” plate (with the whole name of the tribe spelled out) in mint condition that my dad had acquired from a local Indian chief in the Everglades, and an exceedingly rare “GZA 936” plate that I had purchased from a vendor in Jaffa’s flea market back in 1980 for the equivalent of $5 (Egypt issued it during its 1948-1967 occupation of Gaza and almost no plates from that era remain).

That plate—written in Arabic numerals and issued sometime in the 1950s, when the Gaza Strip was still ruled by Egypt—is now in the hands of a St. Petersburg, Fla., collector and would probably fetch well over $1,000, if he ever decides to sell it.

The Palestinian plates are all mixed up with the tortured history of the West Bank and Gaza.

Regional plates issued for Bethlehem (top), Gaza (middle) and Nablus (bottom) under Israeli and Palestinian administrations (photo, as all further ones in this story, by Larry Luxner)

Until 1994, the West Bank and Gaza used Israeli government-issued blue plates which besides a registration number also contained a Hebrew letter denoting the district: the most common were “ע” for Gaza, “ב” for Bethlehem, “ח” for Hebron, “שׁ” for Nablus and “ר” for Ramallah. But then the Palestinian Authority was established, and while it’s less that a full country plates changed and are now green on white with the letter “P” on the right side and its Arabic equivalent just below. Fans of the Netflix action series Fauda may recall the show’s opening sequence, which features Jewish counterterrorism agents switching the plates on their van from yellow Israeli to white Palestinian ones to avoid detection as they attempt to infiltrate Hamas strongholds.

Other places that have wrestled with occupations also see their history play out in the landscape of their license plates.

Ever since Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, vehicles registered in the self-styled (and Russia-dominated) Republic of Abkhazia must bear only Russian-issued plates designated ABH; likewise, RSO plates are required for the Republic of South Ossetia, another enclave that’s occupied. Vehicles with such plates may not enter the part of Georgia that remains independent, nor may cars with standard Georgian plates cross into either of those two fake “countries”—which together occupy 20% of Georgia’s land area yet are recognized only by Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria and the guano-covered, 8-square-mile Pacific island of Nauru.

Russian-issued plates for the two breakaway republics of Georgia currently under military occupation: Abkhazia (ABH) and South Ossetia (RSO)

Russia issues similar plates for the eastern regions of Ukraine currently under Kremlin occupation: the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR).

Likewise, the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which occupies 37% of this eastern Mediterranean island, is recognized only by Turkey. Yet the TRNC issues its own license plates, one of which I was fortunate to obtain from a Greek-speaking taxi driver who during my 2018 trip there briefly drove me into Turkish-controlled Nicosia—the world’s last divided city.

Passenger plate issued by the self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is recognized only by Turkey

Azerbaijan remains, for all intents and purposes, a dictatorship run since 2003 by the Aliyev dynasty, which makes any attempt to smuggle license plates out of the country especially risky. Not long ago, one unfortunate Russian collector (who’d prefer not to be identified) tried to mail a plate from Azerbaijan back to his Moscow home address. He was caught and ended up spending a year in a Baku prison, reflecting the serious attitude toward plates in that hard land.

In September 2011, Azerbaijani plates took on an unusual new look with the addition of a little microchip hidden under a raised, rounded rectangle on the plate’s lower left corner, under the flag. The Portuguese company Porta Saber supplies the plate as well as the RFiD chip, which helps authorities stop license plate cloning, vehicle registration fraud and tax evasion. On its website, Porta says its technology also “has the ability to automatically and blindly identify any tagged vehicle on the road, at any time of the day or night, in any weather conditions”.

Given Aliyev’s iron-fisted rule, it’s likely those microchips are doing more than ensuring road safety; they also help the regime monitor the whereabouts of Azerbaijan’s 10 million citizens.

This isn’t the only way dictators are creative with plates. Back in the 1950s, some Latin American despots renamed major cities and even entire provinces after themselves—a fact reflected in their license plates. Three such examples are in my collection: a plate from Argentina’s Provincia Eva Perón (later renamed La Pampa); Paraguay’s Puerto Presidente Stroessner (which became Ciudad del Este following Alfredo Stroessner’s overthrow); and the Dominican Republic’s Ciudad Trujillo (which after Rafael Trujillo’s ouster reverted back to the capital’s old name, Santo Domingo).

Vintage license plates from Provincia Eva Perón, now La Pampa (Argentina); Puerto Presidente Stroessner, now Ciudad del Este (Paraguay), and Ciudad Trujillo, now Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic)

I’d own them all. But one plate I won’t have in my collection is any issued by Adolf Hitler’s Germany bearing a Nazi swastika. Neither will Sven Rost, who runs what is quite possibly the world’s largest license-plate museum in the sleepy German hamlet of Großolbersdorf, home to 3,000 people.

Sven Rost, founder of the license plate museum in Großolbersdorf, Germany

Located 12 miles from the Czech border, the Internationales Museum Für Nummernschilder und Verkehrsgeschichte, as it’s officially known, looks like an aging industrial warehouse about one city block long. Visitors entering the museum’s side entrance are welcomed by an arrangement of colorful motorcycle plates from all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, as well as a smaller panel of limited-issue plates commemorating the Olympics from the US Virgin Islands, Spain and Australia. The staircase ascending to the first of three levels is decorated with old yellow porcelain East German highway signs.

There, one can find rows and rows of vertical wooden panels that display a dizzying variety of license plates behind glass. They’re painstakingly arranged by geographic region (Caribbean, Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, Pacific) rather than chronologically, with a separate section devoted specifically to pre-war German plates and their history.

“Everything you see here is 99.9% from my private collection,” said Rost, 54, who began saving plates in 1984 and charges visitors a nominal €2.20 admission fee. The 350-square-meter facility, a former factory that used to churn out wooden toys and, furniture, receives several thousand visitors a year and is popular with families.

Sven opened his museum in 2001 with German government assistance. Some 5,000 plates (only a small fraction of the collection’s total size) are on display, representing every country and jurisdiction on Earth, though he said “we also try to get plates from most former countries.”

Ambassadors are, of course, a great source for exotic license plates.

Now-retired Gene Cretz, the former US ambassador to Libya, displays the license plate that graced the car of the previous US ambassador in Tripoli, Joseph Palmer, who left in 1972

Bruce Mack, the former US envoy to the United Arab Emirates, picked up a particularly rare specimen in 1991 during an official tour to Kuwait following Iraq’s defeat in the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had issued these plates for Kuwait—which he considered the 19th province of Iraq. But the Kuwaitis hated them and destroyed as many as possible—making the one Mack later gifted me a rarity highly sought by collectors.

Some plates are simply too valuable to be given away.

One such example is “26 53,” the square black Libyan plate with Arabic script that had graced the diplomatic vehicle of former US Ambassador Joseph Palmer. In November 1972, Palmer was recalled to Washington after a young Col. Muammar Qaddafi closed US air bases in Libya and partially nationalized foreign oil companies. When diplomatic relations were finally restored 35 years later—in 2007—the State Department sent Gene Cretz to reopen the embassy in Tripoli.

Two years later, I had a chance to interview Ambassador Cretz during a reporting trip to Libya. At the end of our meeting, the diplomat—now happily retired in Bethesda, Maryland—proudly took the souvenir from a desk drawer and held it up for a quick photo. But it was obvious this plate wasn’t leaving the embassy; it’s a relic of history.

Political status is a huge source of tension. Residents of Puerto Rico, my home for nine years, continually debate whether the island should remain a US territory—known in Spanish as “Estado Libre Asociado”—or become the 51^st state of the union, or an independent country.

Puerto Rico’s “Estado Libre Asociado” license plate marking 50 years of commonwealth status was quickly discontinued following political controversy, making it highly sought by collectors

In 2002, the local Department of Transportation issued special license plates marking the 50th anniversary of “commonwealth” status, sparking a huge outcry. Those plates—featuring the flags of the United States and Puerto Rico—were quickly withdrawn from circulation, making them highly sought-after collectors’ items today.

Likewise, two Balkan nations nearly went to war last year when Kosovo—a breakaway republic of Serbia—demanded that ethnic Serbs in the country’s north surrender their Serbian-issued plates and use Kosovar ones instead. The EU managed to prevent further escalation, but not before Serbia quietly stopped issuing plates for the in-between Kosovo-Mitrovica region. Those “KM” plates are now nearly impossible to find; I was incredibly lucky to find a pair during a recent trip to Prizren earlier this month, along with a standard Kosovo plate abandoned by the roadside.

A pair of rare Serbian-issued Kosovo-Mitrovica plates against a panoramic view of Prizren, taken from a castle overlooking the medieval city

In Israel, I know of perhaps a dozen license plate collectors besides myself. Our undisputed maven is Dr. Nimrod Rahamimov, 63, who also heads the orthopedics department at Galilee Medical Center in Nahariyya. An entire section of wall space at Nimrod’s home is filled with plates he’s collected ever since his childhood in the United States. Nimrod’s focus is clearly early Israeli plates and those of the Arab world, particularly Egypt, Lebanon and Syria—a passion fueled by his wartime service in the IDF.

“One plate in my collection came from a crushed Mercedes in Lebanon that had been overrun by a tank during the fighting in 1982,” he said. “I saw the car, and I had a handy screwdriver. The car was useless, and the plate obviously had no value to the owner, so I took it.”

Unlike most fellow collectors, Nimrod only buys. He almost never sells or trades what he has—at least not in a very long time.

“In 1998, when Israel was 50 years old, we switched to the blue IL euroband [referring to the blue vertical stripe on the left side of vehicle license plates in many European countries] … so there was a surge in demand,” he said. “I had a few friends who owned junkyards here, so I was able to make fantastic trades. But that lasted for only a short period. There’s no demand for them anymore. Today you can get whatever you want cheaply on eBay.” Nimrod has about 350 displayed on the walls, “and in boxes, hundreds more. I have absolutely no idea how many.”

“My children will find out after my shiva.”