Thanks to Mr. Kamil Fatih Arlı, Mr. Hakan Yılmaz, Mr. Osman Leven Seral, Mr. Carl Catherman, the TRFILA forum and the Postman forum, a mystery that was haunting me for more than a year is solved. Couple of years ago I acquired this card because of the interesting cancellation on it. Soon after posting it on the TRFILA forum, I learned that postcard was prepared by M. Melissopoulos (his cachet is always on the postcard), a famous postcard trader from Constantinople. His "signature" was the special cancellation. After reviewing this cancellation Mr. Carl Catherman told me that a coin was used to create this cancellation. My interest was peaked; however, I could not find which coin was used even though I spent a lot of time going through many numismatic sites about Ottoman coinage.

Recently, I saw a similar card posted by Mr. Hakan Yılmaz. Several posts later, I Iearned from Mr. Kamil Fatih Arlı that the "signature" cancellation was created using a copper 20 Para coin from Sultan Abdulmecid.

Picture of the coin courtesy of Mr. Arlı.

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• This site will be officially open to general use. This means there will be activity in the forums – hopefully – with contributions from you.
• New articles I had collected from various editors will be added to the site.
• I would like to add the Turkish PTT issues official postal reference brochures as part of the stamp catalog. I believe there are more than 1000 of these sheets issued to date. I only have a fraction of these brochures: 70 to 80 in total. I need help to complete these as much as possible.  Please send me a message if you have a good collection of these brochures and willing to share.
• Philatelic events will be added to the event calendar. If you see certain local events are missing please let me know. I will add them to the list.

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Last weekend inbetween visiting friends and doing the pumpkin patch rounds with my family I found some time to visit Cupex. As I had never paid much attention to local philatelic events this was my first. The show was in Urbana, Illinois. At the door Peter Michalove greeted me. Besides attending the show, I really wanted to meet him because of his collecting interest.

He had two panels of philatelic delight: Covers and postal stationary of the 1901 issue interior and exterior stamps. Opening up with a beatiful Paquebot on cover, the display went through the usage of stamps and postal rates of the time. Interestingly, there were covers used inland with exterior stamps and vice versa. From the postal rates, I earned something new: the littoral rate. Some of you may already know but it was a first for me. The littoral postage rate was used for postage carried in the seashore from one city to another. If I remember correctly, the rate was half of the inland rate. There are many other interesting finds in Peter's covers. Specially, one with the talismanic number 1248 [[Beduh]] was an interesting one to see.

Unfortunately, I've spent a lot of time in front of Peter's display and didn't get to see the rest of the show. Next time I've got to spare more time...

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