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You are here: Home / Provisional Postmarks / Lūšė (Lūša) 1919-1921

Lūšė (Lūša) 1919-1921

May 12, 2010 By Vytautas Doniela

Lūšė is a railway station ca. 20 km north-west of Mažeikiai, on a major rail route Liepaja – Šiauliai – Vilnius. Provisional postal markings show that a Lithuanian postal facility was at work at the Lūšė railway station in 1920, but as its name does not appear in the basic Pašto Valdyba documents for 1919 and 1920, the exact date of its opening is not known.

In World War One, Lūšė (Lusha, Luscha) was taken during German attempts to secure the railway knot Mažeikiai (Muravjovo, Murawjewo) after Armeegruppe Lauenstein had launched an advance into Žemaitija and Courland on April 27, 1915. After the German army retreated from Russia at the end of 1918, a strip along the Baltic coast, including Lūšė, was held back from the Red Army by the volunteer Eiserne Division.

During the early part of 1919 the strategic rail route Liepaja – Šiauliai was contested by German and Red Army units, then it came under the control of the German voluntary borderguards, the Grenzschutz, and later it was closely guarded by Bermondt’s Russo-German Westarmee or Zapadnaja Armija. It is most likely that Lūšė, as a Lithuanian postal facility housed in a railway station, was operative only after the eviction of the “bermontininkai” at the end of 1919.

As yet, it is not known who was in charge of the Lūšė R/S postal facility at its opening. Its stamp stock consisted of Fourth Berlin Issue, and for cancelling it used two devices: a one-line cachet “ST. LUŠĖ” (where ST = stotis = railway station), and also a boxed cachet with the same inscription.  

As far as is known, registration was marked in manuscript within a hand-drawn frame.

By early 1922 Lūšė was provided with a standard calendar-type postmarker which now spelled the place-name as LŪŠA and indicated its status as a P.A. = pašto agentūra = postal agency.  Subsequent cancellers amended the spelling back to LŪŠĖ and the agency was upgraded to post office status.

Known provisional markings:

Cancelling by one-liner “ST. LUŠĖ”:
no date pair Berlin IV 50 [colln. Jankauskas]
no date pair Berlin IV 50 [colln. ?]
no date pair Berlin IV 50 [colln. Wilson]
no date single Berlin IV 30, 50 [colln. Liesis]
no date single Berlin IV 30 [colln. Doniela]
no date single Berlin IV 20 [formerly Matuzas]
no date singles Berlin IV 20, 30, 50 [colln. ?]

Cancelling by boxed one-liner “ST. LUŠĖ” and MS registration:
[Dec. 1920 or Jan. 1921 ?] reg. letter No. 992 to USA, Berlin IV 30 x2, 50 x2  [colln. Lapas]

Filed Under: Provisional Postmarks Tagged With: Lū?a, Luse railway postal facility, Postal History, provisional cancels, St. Luse

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