Monday, November 11, 2013

The Crimean "little" offices

As I may have mentioned once of twice, I like postmarks from the Crimea. After years of collecting and gathering information I've now recorded 230 postmarks from the Imperial period and 224 from the Soviet period (up to the final "ASSR" type), and I'm still finding new postmarks regularly.
Some postmarks are easier to find than others, of course. Railway postmarks (apart from Sevastopol' Vokzal) are pretty thin on the ground - I'm still looking for a Kerch' railway postmark for instance - and Volostnoe Pravlenie postmarks are downright rare. Seasonal offices are another group that's rarely seen.
Kerch' actually managed to cram 4 offices into its area: Kerch', Kerch' Railway, Kerch' Krepost and Kerchenskii Zavod. The latter is another office you'll rarely see:

Then there are the Town Sub-offices. Unsurprisingly, Sevastopol' and Simferopol' both had Town sub-offices, although examples are not easy to find. The one that really surprised me was Feodosiya:
By the way, both postmarks have a "1" at foot which I think implied that these were considered to be the 1st sub-office of the main post office. 
Town sub-offices are not listed in the invaluable Kiryushkin-Robinson list of Imperial Russian post offices, so each one that turns up is a surprise. I wonder how many more there are?