Türkiye

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Türkiye

Here we have a cover sent from Heykel-Bursa, Turkey, on 31 July and received and received five weeks later on 5 September! Mail from Turkey to the Philippines takes very long to arrive! Unfortunately, the Turkish Postal Service website is only available in Turkish and I couldn't track down the page for philately, if it even exists.

The three stamps on the left hand side feature Zonguldak, an important port on the Black Sea known for its coal mines. Apparently, the design in one of eight in the definitives series entitled "The Cities" issued 28 May 08. Its denomination, 5 Yeni Kurus, is the lowest in the series.

The stamp on the upper right hand corner is one in a series of two issued to celebrate Saint Valentine's Day. Appropriately, the stamps were released on 14 Feb 08. Considering that it's already October, this stamp is a bit overdue, don't you think?

Türkiye

In comparison to the covers on the previous posts, this cover is rather plain and bland, but it is the first that I have received from Turkey, so I thought it would be nice to post it anyway.

The stamp on the cover is part of a 4v set issued 07 Feb 2008, which commemorated the 800th anniversary of Nasreddin Hodja's birth, according to http://trphilately.blogspot.com.

More on Nasreddin Hoca and Turkish folklore:

The tradition of folklore—folktales, jokes, legends, and the like—in the Turkish language is very rich. Perhaps the most popular figure in the tradition is the aforementioned Nasreddin (known as Nasreddin Hoca, or "teacher Nasreddin", in Turkish), who is the central character of thousands of jokes. He generally appears as a person who, though seeming somewhat stupid to those who must deal with him, actually proves to have a special wisdom all his own:

One day, Nasreddin's neighbor asked him, "Teacher, do you have any forty-year-old vinegar?"—"Yes, I do," answered Nasreddin.—"Can I have some?" asked the neighbor. "I need some to make an ointment with."—"No, you can't have any," answered Nasreddin. "If I gave my forty-year-old vinegar to whoever wanted some, I wouldn't have had it for forty years, would I?"

The postmark reveals that this cover was sent from Heykel, Bursa, Turkey's fourth largest city, on 26 Apr 2008.