When talking with foreigners living in Istria, the last few years I have been bumping into a term I barely recognized: apostil, apostile, or apostille. I knew it had to do with some kind of internationally recognized stamp of authenticity, but I could not even spell it with degree of confidence. After more than three decades in America and Britain, the term was foreign to me, let alone its usage. At a dinner party last night it came up once again, as some of the guests were foreign, and I decided to check it out. Neither of my English dictionaries, one American and another British, had the term, and so I went to the World Wide Web. To my surprise, much of what I discovered at first was in languages such as Polish, Italian, Russian, Romanian, or Croatian. At long last I found what I was looking for in English. The term stands for the legalization of a document, such as a birth or death certificate, for international use under the terms of the 1961 Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents. Phew! Documents that are notarized and then certified with a conformant stamp are accepted for legal use in all the nations that have signed the Hague Convention. Only then I understood why the term pops up so often in languages such as Polish, Italian, Russian, Romanian, or Croatian: these are the countries where thieves and whores guaranty the rule of law.