Saturday, May 3, 2014

Kulėšai 1918

My latest acquisition Kolletzischken 1918
This week I felt so lucky to be able to find a postmark of Kolletzischken (now Kulėšai, Lithuania) 1918 buried among thousands of other Germania stamps. According to Memelgebiet section in Michel Spezial, Kolletzischken is one of "postmark collector friendly" post office that had only one type of postmark which is the one you see on the above scan. Memelgebiet post offices usually made new postmark when it went under French administration but the one in Kolletzischken apparently did not care or was in lack of funds and kept using the old pre-Memelgebiet ones.

the same postmark used in 1923 during the Lithuanian administration
As far as I know there is only one postmark that preceded this one which has probably been used in the second half of the 1850's by the Prussian postal authority, I have never seen it yet but it is spelled Koletzischken with a single "L".
This post office was later closed down on January 1924 and neither the Lithuanian nor the 1939 German re-annexation administration ever reopened it.

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