This is a maximum card of Alexander Pushkin cancelled in 1959 in Vilnius. A maximum card is a postcard with a cancelled postage stamp with the same topic. This one is about Alexander Pushkin, probably the best known Russian poet. Pushkin is actually not totally irrelevant to Vilnius, his great-grand father Hannibal (or Gannibal), a black African believed to be from somewhere in Cameroon, came to Vilnius with his master the emperor Peter the Great and was baptized there in 1705. The church where he has been baptized, St. Paraskeva Church, still stands today in old town of Vilnius and has a memorial plate of the event on the outer wall. Although Alexander himself never lived there, the Pushkin family house and estate (his son Gregory and the wife Barbara lived and died there) is preserved and now serves as a museum of the poet.
The postmark commemorates the 100 years of the establishment of telegraph in Vilnius.
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