Switzerland – Niklaus von Flüe, also known as Brother Klaus, was a farmer, councillor and judge. As a seeker of God, a mystic and hermit, he became a highly in uential adviser and peace broker. He had a prominent impact on Switzerland’s history.

In the period following the Burgundian Wars, when various meetings (diets) held between delegates of the cities of Lucerne, Zurich and Berne on the one side and the rural communes of Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Glarus and Zug on the other failed to produce an agreement, the Confederation was under threat of collapse. It was thanks solely to the intermediation of Brother Klaus that the Treaty of Stans came into being in 1481, which ultimately also led to the cantons of Fribourg and Solothurn being admitted into the Confederation. Until the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798, it represented the sole quasi-constitutional foundation that the Old Confederation had.

Designed by Obwalden native Markus Bucher, the special stamp accentuates the iconographic quality of the underlying portrait by an unknown painter. Bucher focuses in particular on the intrinsically peaceful yet very penetrating, far-sight- ed gaze. The reductive, linear execution underscores the simple and ascetic life that recluse Niklaus von Flüe led.

Issue Date: 23.02.2017
Designer: Markus Bucher, Zurich
Printer: Cartor Security Printing, La Loupe, France
Process: Offset
Colours: 4
Size: Stamps: 28×33 mm, Sheet: 140×195 mm (5 rows of 4 stamps)
Values: CHF 1.00