The correspondence needs of Greek soldiers during the Asia Minor Campaign were covered by various publishers, who issued war letter cards, such as Sarantopoulos, Nikolaidis, de Padova Freres, and others. An interesting series of war letter cards is also that of the publishers Alepandou and Kotsifas, which we dealt with in a previous article in the magazine "collections", issue 176, March 1999, pp. 208-211, and they were the ones with the greatest variety of subjects and the most copies published. In my personal collection, there are 100 different subjects of these letter cards, and I want to believe that this collection is complete.
Unfortunately, the information we have about both the publishers and the letter cards is extremely poor. According to the logo printed on the back of the cards, the publishers Alepandos and Kotsifas had their offices at 59 Stadiou Street in Athens. The cards had themes of war scenes from the Campaign, snapshots from the daily life of soldiers, or landscapes from Asia Minor. As the captions of the cards state, the images were taken from the "official war exhibition", which, as we know, was organized at Zappeion in June 1922 by the Cartographic Service of the Army. Because this exhibition had a propagandistic purpose, the war photographs depicted the "good" side of front life, with idyllic and calm landscapes, as well as cute snapshots from the daily life of soldiers, while the war scenes were obviously staged. The fact that the images of the cards were taken from the "official war exhibition" allows us to date the series to the beginning of the summer of 1922. This hypothesis is reinforced by the fact that some cards have as their subject the Sokia and the new Ephesus, which, as it is known, were occupied by the Greek army on April 8 and 18, 1922, respectively, when the Italians who held them withdrew from Asia Minor. It also appears that these cards did not have time to be sent to the front, which collapsed on August 13, 1922, as I do not have any in my possession that have been mailed from the front out of the numerous cards that were issued. Another interesting element that emerges from the study of the subjects concerns the political ideology of the publishers. It seems that these publishers were of liberal mindset, as in a period of the omnipotence of the Royal governments, they did not hesitate to issue three of the cards in the series featuring famous Venizelist military figures, while they avoided issuing even one with Royalist figures. The first of the aforementioned cards depicts Lieutenant General Leonidas Paraskevopoulos, commander of the Army of Asia Minor under the Venizelos government, and his Staff, together with British and French officers, thus emphasizing the reputation that Greece maintained among the Allies during that period, in contrast to the diplomatic isolation it experienced under the Royal governments that followed. The other two depict the devoted to Venizelos Major General Nikolaos Plastiras, commander of the 5/42 Evzones Regiment.
In the following text, we will attempt to undertake a step-by-step historical journey through the Asia Minor Campaign, through the one hundred photographs of the above-mentioned letter cards.