The Stamps Of Turkey / Turkiye: On Steiner Pages.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Rod's court....

Received a free gift of Turkey stamps from somebody,
no letter, no return address.

Whomever it was....Thank you.

Sounds like maybe from Dave 1941?

Cheers Chris .

Hello AGB / Andrew - sorry for the long delay - was away for a bit & just saw your post. Awesome collection - very nice!!

All of the overprints look genuine from what I can see. Without looking at each one under a glass, I'm going to throw out some theories & let the experts at hand comment at their leisure...

The 'overprints' are genuine - in that they are the genuine overprint used to create Mt Athos local issues. Yet it seems to me - from my experience & looking at your collection - that some 'enterprising' people were using this overprint - handstamp when perhaps they should not have been.

I'm going to say that these are illegal usages of the Mt Athos local overprint. While it is possible that there are many unrecorded uses, the more logical answer is that they were used illegally. Someone just took the handstamp & overprinted whatever stamps they had - and then sold them / used them.

All of the stamps & cancels are correct for the period. So it is not a big leap to assume that they could've been postally used when they should not have been - I can't imagine there was lots of postal inspectors running around checking! We are talking about 1880-1881...

Of course, the other possibility is that there are significant numbers of unrecorded uses - that Isfila simply missed. But that seems to be a stretch...

Would love to hear what everyone thinks...always fun when unlisted items appear!!

Turkey Stamps Overprinted.
Thrace
1920
Steiner Page 11.

Page (Design) created by Mr. George Toussaint.

Page CV : $29

Hi Michael,

I suspect that the Isfila listing is incomplete particularly as its listing and Michel's do not match.

I wonder if this was just a handstamp that was applied to whatever stamps were on hand on Mount Athos.

Do we know yet what the overprint means?


Hi Rod,

I thought it was really funny to see the address "Belfast, England" updated to "Glasgow, England"!

Yes Nigel, but I guess, the Commercial Bank of Scotland <could> exist in Ireland. :)

I sent a Cover to Mette Heindorff in Denmark, and it went via Denmark in Western Australia.
When one is stuffing covers in Pigeon holes all morning, a slip like that is understandable.

Hi Rod,

Yes, I agree but what I thought was funny was that neither Belfast nor Glasgow is in England.

Hi nigelc

I read somewhere that the initials in the triangle were of the local postman
Sotirios Chatzi Petropoulos?

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

Thank you so much indeed for that information.

Google led me to the following in a very useful article by Jan Mascini on the postal history of stamps of Mount Athos:

The Turkish stamps that were used in the period 1868 - 1882 were cancelled with the double-ring seal no. 1, with the inscription in Arabic letters AYNAROS (AYNOROS or AYON-OROS = Holy Mountain).

Because these stamps had to be purchased in golden liras, people started smuggling stamps bought with much cheaper paper liras in Constantinople to Mount Athos, which made the stamps at the local post-office unsaleable.

To combat this smuggling,the stamps were overprinted with a small triangle containing the initials of the local postman, Sotirios Chatzi Petropoulos.

Only these overprinted stamps were allowed for use on Mount Athos, notwithstanding that they were also found with the cancellations of other places.

I'm delighted to find the reason for these overprints to be stated so clearly.

The whole article looks fascinating.

Nice story Rod. I didn't know her but I remember her lovely web sites fondly.

When I was at school in Scotland the papers would often tell us stories of letters from somewhere in Scotland to Perth being sent via Perth, Australia by mistake.

Taahhutlu is registered, as in registered mail. Matbua is 'printed matter' - like newspapers/magazines - the word associated with anything mailed using newspaper stamps...

Great info on the Mt Athos overprint! Seems like I'll need a Michel catalog at some point...was hoping to avoid that!

Is that your Thrace page Rod? Who is George Toussaint? Nice page!!

Hi Michael,
Yes my page.

Mr. William Steiner designs the majority of his pages, (It appears) that on more specialised emissions / countries, he uses colleagues that possibly have advanced collections, and he uses their designs of page layout, possibly in a collaboration.

I like to give credit due, when possible.

PS: Yes, great information on Mount Athos stamps, a keeper.

Nigel,
was not aware you were a Scot....