A pensioner in Siberia says she has found in her mailbox two New Year's greeting cards that took more than 30 years for the post office to deliver.
"At first I thought the card was just designed in a retro way, you know, because right now that's trendy," Valentina Ignatyeva, who hails from the city of Chelyabinsk, was cited as saying by local news site Khoroshiye Novosti.
Upon inspecting the card, however, Ignatyeva realized it had been addressed to her father — who had died years before the card managed to make it to him.
The letters were sent from Chelyabinsk and Tashkent, from men who had fought alongside Ignatyeva's father in the Great Patriotic War, the report said.
Photographs of the cards published on regional online news website Hornews.ru show Soviet-era stamps with a hammer and sickle mark.
Ignatyeva said she didn't see any point in responding to the letters, both sent in late 1981, since the senders had likely also passed away.
Russia's postal service frequently serves as fodder for jokes about its slow service. In late September, a woman from Siberia said she had failed to get into college because the state-run postal service took so long to deliver her application it missed the deadline.
A 2012 study of 159 postal services worldwide placed Russian Post among the worst.
