No passport? No worries

Next weekend, immigration officials at airports across Europe will drop whatever residual passport checks still exist for flights to, from and between the nine countries that joined the Schengen zone late last year. Controls at land borders faded before Christmas, and now airports follow suit.

For many Europeans whose travel is confined to the Schengen area, their passport suddenly becomes redundant. In Russia, there is a proverb that recalls that a man consists of a body, a soul and a passport. That didn’t stop the Russian writer Anton Chekhov travelling around Russia with nothing more than his university diploma as evidence of his identity and good character. But actually passports are not such an age-old institution as the Russian proverb might imply. The illustrious guidebooks of Mr Baedeker advised in the eighteen eighties that passports were generally unnecessary for travel across Europe, although there followed the reminder that a passport might be of service in helping a gentleman-traveller secure access to private collections.

A hundred years ago, travellers could still wander hither and thither across many parts of Europe without any formal documentation. Where a traveller did have a passport in those days, it was often just a single sheet of paper. European passports of the nineteenth century were little more than a commendation and a request for safe conduct. They had little of the sophistication of the modern booklet style passports - with their watermarks, detailed embossing and a myriad of latent images. Indeed, a hundred years ago, there were no photographs on passports - they were not to appear until about 1915. The notion of the booklet style passport only popped up in 1920, when a League of Nations conference recommended a more standardised format for passports: a bound booklet with details of the holder - including a description and photograph, and thirty-two numbered pages reserved for official observations and visas. It is a format that has stood the test of time.

This is the ninth in a series of regular posts by Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries who together edit hidden europe magazine (http://www.hiddeneurope.co.uk). The May 2007 issue of the magazine had an article on the history of passports in European travel. This post draws in part upon that article.