the period, which featured the ruling head of state, Moldavia's had the ancient coat of arms with the head of an aurochs. There is a five-pointed star between the horns. The aurochs' lower lip rests on a post horn, within the inner tube of which is the stamp's value in Arabic numerals. The horn and head are enclosed in a circle. Around this circle, in the interior above the head, are the Romanian Cyrillic letters ПОРТО СКРИСОРИ (PORTO SCRISORI; "letters to be paid for by the recipient"). The use of the word PORTO is a mistake; FRANCO denotes letters where the postage has been paid by the sender, as was the case for letters using these stamps. Aside from the economic advantage derived from simplifying communications, the stamps and the symbol they used were a political statement against the Ottoman Empire that still exercised suzerainty over the principality. The Ottomans themselves would not issue a stamp until 1863. Indeed, they are the first stamps from Southeast Europe, with Greece issuing its first in 1861, Serbia in 1866 and Bulgaria in 1879. Earlier attempts to introduce a national coin or seal had been denied by Turkey, but the stamp, Moldavia's first exercise of autonomous statehood, was allowed because the relevant imperial authorities there were not yet familiar with the notion. The paper used to print the stamps came from Bath, Somerset, imported by an Iaşi merchant and bought by the Finance Ministry. (According to another variant, the project was undertaken in haste, and leaves of paper were bought from an Iaşi bookstore.) Each sheet had 32 stamps, with four rows of eight, and the middle rows included eight tête-bêche pairs. The 27 para were done in black ink; the rest in blue. The sheets were tinted rose (27 para), greenish (54 para), bluish (81 para) and light rose (108 para). The paper was horizontally lined, except for the 81 para, which was ordinary paper. The sheets were gummed manually with a brush using gum arabic. The stamps were imperforate, cut with scissors at the post office. Because of this, individual stamps have significant size differences between them. Also, due to the manual printing, the rows of stamps were not properly aligned on the sheets. Stamps were cancelled with a double circle featuring the name of the post office above and the word Moldova below, in capital letters. In the middle, in