During the German occupation in WWI, Marijampolė (sometimes spelt Mariampolė without “j”), had a civilian post office within the Postgebiet Ob.-Ost system, named Mariampol. It was opened on April 20, 1916 and closed on December 29, 1918.

Mariampolė was among the earliest post offices to be taken over from the German system. The first postmaster (įgaliotinis) with a mandate to take over the German facility after its closure was Juozas Gulbinas. He was selected by “Pašto Valdyba” in advance as early as December 18, 1918, but it is not certain when the Lithuanian post office did actually open. A contemporary, Andrius Bočys, who in February 1919 took up duties there as a postman, reminisced that to start with the post office had no stamps and that pre-payment was made in cash with an appropriate notation on the postal item. If this was indeed so, no such items are known to have survived. However, early mail shows that Marijampolė did have at least some, if not all, values from the First Vilnius and Second Vilnius Issues, soon followed by values from the Second Kaunas and Third Kaunas Issues.

Kaunas being the first, evidence shows that Marijampolė was the second to be provided with a standard calendar-type postmarker. The first date for Kaunas is January 3, 1919, and dates from Marijampolė go back (as known so far) to February 1, 1919.

On or about January 4 a further employee (valdininkas) Ludvikas Martinkaitis took up duties, and in July 1919 an assistant postmaster, Vladas Kazys Varanka, was appointed. Until June of that year he had been postmaster (įgaliotinis) at Joniškis. In the second half of 1919 a few more technical employees were added.

In Lithuania’s early postal history Marijampolė is associated with an intriguing and not fully cleared-up event, namely illegal or semi-legal stereo reproduction of complete sheetlets of all the values of the First Kaunas and the Second Kaunas Issues. A considerable proportion of these reprints were mass cancelled with the Marijampolė postmarker and for this reason have come to be popularly known as “Marijampolė reprints”. For many years a rumor had it that these reprints were produced with the connivance of Lithuanian authorities, seemingly for a worthy cause, to supplement the funds of the otherwise impecunious Lithuanian delegation at the Peace Conference in Versailles in 1919. This rumor may have originated in a misreading of official documents. While in 1919 some Lithuanian stamps were indeed sent abroad for possible sale to dealers and collectors, the stocks so offered comprised not the Kaunas Issues but the coloured Berlin Issues.

The mass cancelling of the reprints by using the first circular Marijampolė postmarker is linked with the report that this postmarker was stolen from the post office on July 12, 1919.  Whatever the truth about its disappearance, the immediate effect was that now cancelling had to be done in some makeshift manner. The first tool so used was a circular two-ring seal-like cachet inscribed “LIETUVOS PAŠTAS  *  *  MARIAMPOLĖS KONTORA”.

However, as its centre happened to be adorned by a five-pointed star, it was withdrawn in haste (hence its use is extremely rare!), and the star removed.

The adapted erased version of the seal-like cachet/postmarker was in use for a considerable span of time, well into the year 1920 and is not a rarity.  This makeshift postmarker had no movable date bridge, so the date was usually written in by hand, either onto the stamp or next to it. The cachet was withdrawn when a new calendar-type canceller, indexed “B”, was provided. But its design was different (reported to have been delivered from Vilnius during the city’s short-lived repossession by Lithuanians in the summer and autumn of 1920), so that before long a “normal” postmarker was supplied, again with index “B”. For a while two different calendar-type postmarkers, both indexed “B”, were in use side by side.

In addition to the fact that for some time Marijampolė had no regular calendar-type canceller, Mariampolė also had no regular (oblong rectangular) registration cachet. At the beginning, registration was indicated by affixing a home-made label done in red ink, but after a few weeks registration was noted by simply writing large “R” with “Marijampolė” and serial number, sometimes within a red frame. The practice of hand-written registration can be seen as late as 1921.

Some of the covers known with the provisional circular seal-like (no-star) cancellation.

1 / VIII cover to Königsberg [colln. Doniela]
10 / IX  cover to Kalvarija [ Doniela]
no date cover to USA [?]

Items known with provisional hand-written registration markings:

80 9 IV 19 cover, manuscript reg. label in red, to Kaunas [Doniela]
90 11 IV 19 cover, manuscript reg. label in red, to Kaunas [?]
242 11 VI 19 cover, manuscript in red box, to Berlin [Bubnys]
392 (July 1919) cover, manuscript, to Germany [?]
496 2 VIII 1921 cover, manuscript black, to USA [Doniela]

For more information about the post office of Marijampolė in 1919-1920 see V. Doniela’s article (in Lithuanian) “Marijampolės paštas: 1919-1920 metai” in the Journal of the Lithuanian Philatelic Society of Chicago, No. 227 (2000), pp. 51 – 58.