Show Us Photos Of Your Post Offices!

Valladolid above




Oops! Wrong one. Should be Ferdinand of Aragón.

Poznan, spelled , is the fifth-largest city in Poland. The city is 300 kilometres west of Warsaw, and about halfway between Warsaw and Berlin. Frequent trains to and from both cities take circa 2:30 to 2:45 hours. The city's airport is served by several of Europe's national and low-cost carriers. (The low-cost carriers mean the centre will be overrun by a younger crowd that will drink too much and make noise until deep in the night, especially in summer.) A bus (at the time of writing line 159) runs between the main train station and the airport, every 20 to 30 minutes. This can get crowded after the almost simultaneous arrival of a few flights. From the main station, trams will take you almost anywhere in the city.

Poznan is the administrative capital of the voivodeship of Wielkopolska, considered the cradle of Poland. It is thought that the baptism of Duke Mieszko I took place in a chapel of the ducal residence. Shortly after, a cathedral was built that was the first in Poland. The Duke and early Piast Monarchs were buried in the cathedral. The brick-Gothic cathedral replacing that earlier one, originally, was built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Having been damaged or destroyed by fire and war, the cathedral was remodelled and, finally, rebuilt in Gothic style after World War II.



After the second partition of Poland, in 1793, the city came under control of Prussia. King Wilhelm II of Prussia and Emperor of Germany commissioned the construction of a neo-Romanesque palace. The palace that was built between 1905 and 1910 is known as "castle."



The old town centres around a mediaeval square lined by houses with colourful façades. Most façades are in Renaissance style. Some have sgraffito decorations. In the centre of the square stands the old town hall. It was built in the late thirteenth century. It got its present mannerist appearance when it was remodelled by Giovanni Battista di Quadro in the1550s. At noon, the fighting goats of the mechanical clock (glockenspiel) appear.




It should be noted that the city was heavily damaged during World War II and that almost everything has been restored after the war. Most was restored as it was before the war. Some sights, like the mediaeval royal castle in the background of the last picture are reconstructions.

Just outside the old centre, at the back of a small shopping centre at the end of Wroclawska street (tram stops on either side, of which Wroclawska is the most convenient to get to the old town from the main train station) is a post office.




The clerk at the post office was very helpful. When she checked the postage for postcards I wanted to send to Russia, she had to disappoint me. As a result of the Russian war on Ukraine, Polish Post does not process mail to Russia. So, I had to take a few of my postcards home and post them in the Netherlands.

There, also is a small post office outlet just off the main square under the arches of one of the streets at one of the square's corners.

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This is the post office in the town I live in. Reedsburg Wisconsin




Jeremy

I like the Farley plaque

I'm glad that you noticed it. I like it too.

I asked some of the postal clerks who work there if they knew anything about the plaque and the history of the building and all I got was a deer in the headlights look.

Jeremy

Typical... fewer and fewer people care about history...

Below is the old Post Office in Lincoln, MA. The full service one is down the road. This one still has the PO boxes inside, but I think it offers very limited hours and services.

Hameln or Hamelin in English is a town 45 kilometres southwest of Hannover. The S5 S-Bahn takes just over an hour from Hannover Airport or 40 minutes from Hannover Hbf (Main Station). The train station in Hamelin is about 1.5 kilometres from the old town.



The small historic centre is easy to navigate on foot. There are two main thorough fares that meet at the Hochzeithaus, a building that is typical of the local Weser Renaissance, named for the River Weser on which the town was built.



All sights are within 100 metres of these two streets; the sole exception being the small section of the town walls with two towers that remains. The sights include several houses with stone façades and many with half-timber façades of which a few from the sixteenth century stand out.



Coming from the trains station, passing by the tourist office, one of the first sights will be the Weser Renaissance Rattenfängerhaus. The house takes its name from an inscription of something that, according to a local legend, occurred on 26 June 1284, long before the house was built.



The legend, of course, is that of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (also known as the Rat Catcher of Hamelin in German). The Glockenspiel on the side of the Hochzeitshaus (top picture) shows the legend three times a day. During the summer (mid-May until mid-September) at noon on Sunday, a local amateur dramatics group will perform the legend on a stage adjoining the Hochzeithaus (free to watch, expect to be asked for a voluntary contribution - highly recommended).



The post office is on one of the two throughfares. As usual in Germany, it also houses the Postbank and DHL.



When I visited the post office (22 August 2025), there was a variable postage label vending machine. It, however, was out of service.



The information displayed on the screen suggested that these machines are being phased out.



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My old man, decades after leaving school, could still recite Browning's Pied Piper poem.

@NSK those are great pics from Hamelin, thanks for showing them.

I also remember reading about the Pied Piper der Rattenfänger von Hameln when I was a small child and it was kind of scary like so many of Grimm's fairy tales.
Reading up on it on wikipedia there is a lot of controversy about it.
Did it really happen? Did the piper lead them into to river to drown like he did with the rats?
Were they enslaved and sold into the Baltic east? Did they emigrate to the Eastern
lands or to Transylvania? Did they die of the plague?
I also found out that the word ("pied") referred to his multicoloured clothing


Here is a West German stamp issued in 1978.
Why didn't they wait until 1984 to celebrate the 700th Anniversary of this event?

Germany Scott 1273

Research has shown that vermin do not react to flutes of any sort. So, that part is almost certainly untrue. But legends often explain something that happened and that people could not explain otherwise.

The tale about the vermin and the story about the children do not appear as a single legend until a later time.

What did happen was that Saxons - a name applied to a wider group of people than it is now - were invited to settle in border countries of greater Hungary and Moravia. The story told in Hamelin is that the children disappeared in a cave and surfaced in Siebenbürgen (Transylvania). It is thought a legend about a plague of vermin and the re-settlement of families with young children from Hamelin to those border regions converged in the late Middle Ages to become a single legend. Research has shown many families with names originating in Hamelin settled in Olmütz (Olomouc), somehwere halfway to Siebenbürgen.

However, who cares about scientific research when there are a Glockenspiel, a Freilichtspiel, and an inscription in a timber beam of a half-timber house that can be enjoyed? A guide in Spain once said about a local legend that was put in doubt, that she was not worried about the facts as her identity continued to be defined by the legend.

Here is another theory about what happened with the 130 children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_...r_of_Hamelin

Historian Ursula Sautter, citing the work of linguist Jürgen Udolph, offers this hypothesis in support of the emigration theory:

"After the defeat of the Danes at the Battle of Bornhöved in 1227," explains Udolph, "the region south of the Baltic Sea, which was then inhabited by Slavs, became available for colonization by the Germans." The bishops and dukes of Pomerania, Brandenburg, Uckermark and Prignitz sent out glib "locators", medieval recruitment officers, offering rich rewards to those who were willing to move to the new lands. Thousands of young adults from Lower Saxony and Westphalia headed east. And as evidence, about a dozen Westphalian place names show up in this area. Indeed there are five villages called Hindenburg running in a straight line from Westphalia to Pomerania, as well as three eastern Spiegelbergs and a trail of etymology from Beverungen south of Hamelin to Beveringen northwest of Berlin to Beweringen in modern Poland.[39]

Austria also has a similar legend about a ratcatcher.
DER RATTENFÄNGER VON KORNEUBURG

Austria Scott 1746

Except for there being a ship and not a cave in a hill, it is the same story.

Beautiful San Bernardino Ca

Here is a picture of some old mailboxes at the Tucson AZ mail yard. Not to sure from what years. I was doing a late night Mail Run from Los Angeles Ca. After the trailer was offloaded I was escorted to a secure caged room where I counted and signed for canvass locked bags containing Registered Mail that went to Phoenix Az. It was my first experience transporting Registered Mail .