Early Estonian Provisional Postmarks

Recently there has been a thread on Latvian postmarks (https://goscf.com/t/50154), amongst which Prahanoaki showed us a nice early provisional MS cancel. In this thread I promised to post some early Estonian provisional postmarks and manuscript cancels. Here they are. Sorry for any delay Prahanoaki, but my scanner was broken and I've just gotten a new one.

The period immediately after the Estonian War of Independence (1918-1920) was pretty chaotic as regards the post office. Stamps were issued imperforate but unofficial perforations / roulettes are known from many post offices. Also, there was a chronic shortage of cancellers at all but the primary post offices. There were no official instructions on what to do, so smaller post offices had to "make do", resulting in the continued use of Russian cancellers (sometimes re-engraved), straight-line cancellers and even manuscript cancellations in ink or indelible pencil. At least 164 cancels of these type are known to have been used before things settled down.

Interesting subject and nice collection ,thanks for showing it Tim .

Thx. There's a huge amount more research to do. It would be nice one day to visit some of these places and see what the post office looks like after 100 years.

Well, in 2011 I did "a Postal tour" to Estonia, taking some pictures of PO, boxes and even of an Estonian postman. Most PO are still of the old Soviet style, like the one of Kuressaare on the island (very interesting!) of Saaremaa

Tallin GPO. August 2011

Nice display Tim. Here is what I have of the first issue. I have no idea if the cancels are "provisional".

BeeSee, yours are the central post office cancels. Nice rich colours!

Tim H,
This was much more than I expected... It blew my mind! We are talking about somekind of exhibition level serious work here... wow, I mean really, wow. How did you manage to collect all these?

I have accumulated in various auctions over the years, plus I have a couple of old-style stamp dealers near me and there is a huge amount of stock to browse. Oddly enough I'm in the process of writing this up for my local stamp club, and I am giving a talk in October. There is a lot of research to do!

Most interesting! I've a small collection of the 1990/92 transition period. Far less impressive than yours.

Hi Tim H

Thank you for fantastic post! As passionate Estonian 1918+ MNH collector I've always been fascinated with cancles aswell. Even though I dont have many interesting ones in my own collection. I love Elwa example!(Currently near Tartu, town called Elva) very much. There are few lakes and fantastic forests.

I show You few Tartu cancles of Lillemuster 1918 series. My private collection. Also Revel (Tallin cancel in cyrillic is less common)



regards

Ragner, thanks for sharing with us. Your Revel' (Tallin) cancels on piece are nice. You've also got a nice 15k pair with the Malo-yuannov' (Kolga-Jaani) cancel, similar to the one I showed above. I can't read the cancel on the central 5k but it also looks another Cyrillic one.

Viljandi, 29/03/1919

Nice :-) This is the old German canceller (note the spelling).

Ragner,
Tim H's collection is so outstanding that my Estonian stamps just fade away... but your collection is not bad at all!

Thm H,
Isn't the spelling of Viljandi on the older German canceller: FELLIN? or Am I missing something?
I have a 1918 cover of Fellin.

Yes "Fellin" is the German name of Viljandi. Estonia was conquered (they call it "christianized") by the German Teutonic Knigts in the Middle Ages. The ruling class was German until the first Estonian Republic (1918). So you find many pm with names in German or "Germanized" (like, my 1919 "Wiljandi" pm)forms up to the 30's.
The soviets translated everything to Russian and (on the 80's) to Estonian; which is now the dominant language (with some English) in the country.