Postal history and postage stamps of Turkey
The early history of the post in Turkey is presented here.
History of the Turkish Post
Mail runners
Apart from the little-researched postal history in antiquity, the postal history of Turkey goes back to the time after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. A ski cooperative had formed, a kind of runner who was able to cover several miles at great speed without stopping. They carried light poles with them so that they could swing over small streams and ditches. They originally only served state purposes, but over time they were increasingly used by private customers. For a few hundred years, this cooperative only served the postal service in Turkey.
Riding post
Sultan Mustaphan III had the ski cooperative replaced by mounted couriers in the Russo-Ottoman War and had " relays " built in larger places to change horses. It was not until 1826 that a postal service was founded with fixed departure and arrival times, initially only for government purposes.
Private mail
The transport of personal letters by the state couriers did not begin in Turkey until 1841, which does not rule out the fact that non-official letters had occasionally been transported beforehand against payment of a backschisch. The state couriers connected the imperial capital with the seats of the governors general (Vali) in the provinces ( Vilâyet ). There were further connections between the provincial capitals and the main towns of the districts ( Sandjak ). The provincial authorities bore the costs of these postal connections until 1883.
Special offices for mail purposes were set up at the administrative authorities to handle the couriers. When the state took over the transport of private letters, they were separated from the state authorities in the capital and in the provincial districts and placed under an independent post office. In 1871 the post was combined with the telegraph and placed under a joint management. In 1875 Turkey joined the General Postal Union Treaty of Bern.
Until the outbreak of the First World War, Germany, Austria, France, England, Greece and Egypt had their own postal facilities in Turkey.
German Post in Turkey
In Turkey, there was a German post office in Constantinople since March 1, 1870 . It was in the Galata district . Branch post offices had been in Istanbul since 1876 . On March 1, 1900, another branch post office was added in the Pera district . Before that, on October 1, 1898, another post office was set up in Jaffa . The post offices in Beirut , Smyrna and Jerusalem followed on March 1, 1900 . All were subordinate to the Post Office in Constantinople, which was subordinate to the Reich Post Office in Berlin. The German postal service in Turkey participated in all the provisions of the Universal Postal Treaty and the subsidiary agreements.
With the entry into the First World War, Turkey suspended all treaties that restricted sovereign rights through the existence of foreign post offices in their own country. On September 30, 1914, the German postal service ceased operations in Turkey.
literature
- Handheld dictionary of postal services . Ed .: Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications, Frankfurt a. M. 1853
- Bob Lamb: Turkey. In: American Philatelist December 2015 issue; from the series of articles / category Worldwide In A Nutshell
- Werner Steven: Foreign tariffs for letter and parcel post, 1875-1900. Self-published, Braunschweig 1986.
