Was There A Post Office?

In my areas of philatelic specialism the question is often asked, Were these stamps really issued?

To answer this, you need answers to several other questions:

Was there a post office or post offices?

Were these stamps “available at the counter” – even if only for a short period of time – and would they have been used to frank mail brought in by “an ordinary member of the public”?

What did the post office/s do with the letters franked with the stamps? Did they have the ability to put them into a mail delivery system – and was that system local, regional, national or international?

A key part of this set of questions is played by the “ordinary member of the public”. If the stamps will only be brought out for known philatelists (dealers or collectors) or, say, for the local military commander who has ordered their production, then in the ordinary sense of the word, they are not a regular issue. They are stamps produced by or for favours. On the other hand, the stamps may have franking validity and may succeed in getting a letter carried from A to B in which case one might say that they had a “limited issue”.

For many stamp issues, the vast majority of used stamps are found on (obviously) philatelic mail. The British Empire used to control many small and remote islands – still does – and issued stamps for them. But in some cases as many as 99% of all covers now existing are philatelic.

But what counts is the 1% of non-philatelic mail – the same stamps were available to “ordinary members of the public” (maybe there were just two of them) as well as philatelists.

That is why the 1% (or even the 0.1%) is so important. For example, it is the 1% or less which shows that the stamps of the Northern Army and the North West Army were issued. There clearly exist cards and covers which were not sent for philatelic motives. It’s true that the distances they travelled are mostly quite limited – backwards into Estonia, most notably. But a few made it as far as Finland and in that case you have an even stronger case for saying that the stamps were issued and served to get mail put into a mail distribution system. Similarly, though their period of use in December-January 1918-19 was very short, the original map stamps of Latvia saw limited non-philatelic postal use, both on internal mail and on mail to Germany.

The really difficult questions arise with stamps which appear to have been issued but for which evidence of ordinary postal use is now missing. In some cases, there are not even philatelic covers. There are undoubtedly stamps which were officially prepared and would have had postal validity if used but which went straight from post office counter to waiting philatelists who bought everything for onward sale as mint stamps, none even stuck on philatelic covers. This would be true of an unknown proportion of the combinations of stamp and overprint  issued by Dashnak Armenia which could have been used but weren't.

The only really clever guy in the confusing postal history in which I specialise was Dr Ivan Cherniavsky who produced the 1919 CMT overprints of Kolomea in co-operation with the occupying Romanian military commander. Cherniavsky required that quantities of the stamps be distributed to the post offices which the Romanian authorities controlled. These post offices actually served very few people in a widely illiterate countryside. But they did serve local lawyers who were always sending petitions to the district court in Kolomea, and the stamps got used on their registered mail.

Dr Cherniavsky was in charge of the district court in Kolomea. His clerks simply passed to him the one hundred percent genuine commercially used envelopes which brought petitions to the court. Cherniavsky was an unusual collector. He was interested in ordinary commercial mail.... He took a chance that no one out in those small towns and villages would spot the opportunity to buy the CMT stamps for onward sale. As far as I know, only at one office did some other collector/dealer get to secure part of the issue. Elsewhere, it seems that everything went to the lawyers and back to Kolomea, as Cherniavasky intended.

Romanian Occupation of Pokutia C.M.T. overprints and the Ivan Cherniavsky Monogram

Click on Images to Magnify

At the very useful Philatelic Experts website created by G. Kock (www.filatelia.fi) you can find a drawing of Dr Ivan Cherniavsky's Monogram handstamp, the drawing provided by the Ukrainian Philatelic and Numismatic Society. An image of the real thing can be seen, in violet, on the stamp above together with one of John Bulat's handstamps BULAT BPP from the time when he was a Bundesprüfer for the German BPP

I think there is a little story here. Dr Ivan Cherniavsky was joint creator of the Pokutia C.M.T. overprint issue of 1919 together with Major Turbatu of the Romanian occupation forces. I have written about this in two previous Blogs. You can use the Labels below to find them.

Cherniavsky was a lawyer in charge of the Kolomya District Court and most of the existing non-philatelic envelopes franked with the C.M.T. issue are addressed to the Court, where they were collected by Dr Cherniavsky.

Cherniavsky was a cover collector and would not have removed a stamp from a cover unless ...

The clue is in the green colour of the paper adhering to the stamp. This stamp was removed not from an envelope but from an entire letter - and more specifically a Court Delivery Letter. Such letters or entires were often on thin greyish or greenish paper. In Pokutia, as in the rest of Galicia, a Court Delivery post operated which in the Austrian and Polish periods used distinctive adhesives, the Gerichtszustellungmarken. The stamp above has also been used as a Court Delivery stamp - and Cherniavsky had to peel it off the letter because the document to which it was affixed had to stay in the Court archives, unlike the lawyers' envelopes which he could remove complete. Cherniavsky applied his Monogram after peeling the stamp off the Court Delivery document.

The stamp is uncancelled. Twenty years ago John Bulat - who at some point acquired material from Cherniavsky's collection -  sold me three or four examples of this stamp which did not have postal cancels but did have paper on the back. He was puzzled by them. I think I have solved the puzzle.

In fact, I want to go a bit farther and suggest that the C.M.T. overprints on Austrian Postage Due stamps (Bulat 9 - 13; this is an example of #9) were intended as Court Delivery stamps and were indeed used as such.

Maybe one of my readers can produce a complete Court Delivery document to support this claim? The stamp is for sale.

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html

More Thoughts on 1919 C.M.T. overprints of Pokutia

In the literature (Cherniavsky, Kronenberg, Bulat and others) it is usual to distinguish between "Originals" and "Reprints" for the C.M.T. overprints from the Romanian Occupation of Pokutia. However, it is not in practice possible to distinguish Originals and Reprints from the handstamps (the same ones were used) or from the ink (the same ink pads were used).

This suggests to me an alternative way of thinking (helped by discussion with two of my correspondents). We could think in terms of

(1) Genuine C.M.T. overprints on Austrian stamps, prepared in Chernivtsi at the time
(2) Genuine C.M.T. stamps actually distributed in Pokutia. Here we know from Cherniavsky that only a limited range of combinations of basic stamp and overprint value were distributed in Pokutia and in limited quantities. John Bulat in his Catalog gives the same listing as Cherniavsky and I think we can assume this is correct. However, we will only be able to know that a stamp is from the batch distributed in Pokutia if it is USED and has a postmark from one of the offices to which the stamps were distributed and dated at the correct period. Maybe between twenty and forty covers exist which satisfy these requirements and an unknown number of loose stamps. In addition, a number of mint stamps exist (I have only seen four or five) signed with the monogram of Dr Cherniavsky and it is reasonable to assume (but impossible to prove) that these stamps were ones which were among those distributed in Pokutia.

Above, I show 41 stamps all with genuine overprints on values (or in value combinations) NOT distributed in Pokutia. Some of these have good signatures like that of Mikulski. (Tucked in the corner are three forgeries, one with a Bulat condemnation handstamp)

I also show one genuine cover, correctly franked (60h postage + 1k registration + 20h Charity Tax) which is unusual because it is NOT addressed to the District Court - most known genuine covers are addressed to the District Court in Kolomyja where Cherniavsky worked. The cover is ex-Zelonka collection (and Zelonka deciphered the date on the cancellation as 2 VIII 19) and signed BULAT BPP with a recent Ceremuga certificate.

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html