Eišiškės 1991

Эйшишкес/Eišiškės postmark with the Lithuanian name taken off

Here is an interesting cover I would like to show you today. It is a cover sent in 1991 from Eišiškės to Warsaw, Poland. The fact that the sender writes her address "Eiszyski" (the proper Polish spelling is Ejszyszki) is already bizarre but that's not what I want to point out. Please look at the above postmark. It's a provisional postmark made out of the Soviet one. A typical Lithuanian provisional postmark usually takes out all Soviet elements written in Cyrillic and leaves the Lithuanian spelling of the name of the post office.

Typical provisional postmark

But this postmark of Eišiškės does exactly the opposite and leaves only the Soviet elements. There is an explanation for that. Eišiškės is a town in Šalčininkai district and the percentage of Polish speaking population of this district exceed 80%. At the time when Lithuania declared the restoration of independence, they feared that an ethnic discrimination would follow. Šalčininkai district local council took a leading part for the formation of self-declared autonomous region "Polish National-Territorial Region" (Polski Kraj Narodowo-Terytorialny in Polish) which neither the Lithuanian government nor the Polish government ever recognized. This movement lost support when the 1991 august coup in Soviet Union failed. Lithuanian local postmasters at that time were given the authority to decide the their own local provisional postmark and this lead to the creation of this bizarre postmark as an expression of their political view.