When Turkey issued its first postage stamps in 1863, the country was known as the Ottoman Empire and it encompassed much of the Middle East. Following World War I, enormous political changes took place in what today is Turkey and the new republic was recognised internationally in 1923.
All the stamps of the Ottoman Empire have wording in Arabic script with some occasional words in French. This all changed with the introduction of a new Turkish alphabet which, incidentally, was created by a Swedish linguist.
Last year the Turkish president ordered that the name of the country should be referred to as Türkiye in all languages of the world. It seems he wasn’t too happy with the English version of the country’s name.
One of the most important design element of many 19th-century Turkish stamps was the sultan’s tughra which is a kind of signature. It was only in 1913 that a set of new stamps had a pictorial element featuring the Head Post Office in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). Later that year a set of three impressive stamps featuring the Mosque of Sultan Selim I was recess-printed by Bradbury in England. The Turkish authorities must have been more than
