The new Virtual Tour at the Telecommunications Museum, entitled ‘Telegraphy & Telephony. Communication Stories from before and after the Asia Minor Catastrophe’, is here – www.otegroupmuseum.gr – for you to browse and learn about the Asia Minor Catastrophe from the perspective of Telecommunications!

In an artistically innovative and abstract manner, the Virtual Tour presents the history of the evolution of telecommunications from the beginning of the century to the end of 1930, emphasising the period of preparation for the Asia Minor campaign, the front, and mainly the integration of refugees at home, creating a New Greece.

Visitors can browse topics such as: ‘Eleftherios Venizelos & Wireless Communication’, ‘Hybrid Telecommunications during the Balkan Wars’, ‘Asia Minor front & collapse. The end of the Megali Idea’, ‘Refugees and urban telephony’, ‘A new Greek identity, a brand-new telecommunications landscape’, and more.

The exhibition is enriched with hundreds of artefacts and telegrams from the Telecommunications Museum collection, along with rare photographic material from various museums and cultural institutions in Greece.

Virtual visitors begin their journey in 1910, with the modernisation of Greece. That year, Eleftherios Venizelos took over as prime minister, and radio-electronic communication was used for the first time in Greece by the Hellenic Navy.

The visitor can view photographs and now-obsolete technology that nevertheless contributed to victories in the Balkan Wars, including wired telegraphy, heliographs and optical telegraphs, as well as magnetic phones, which were bulky devices weighing seven kilograms!

We then move on to the Asia Minor Front and highlight the importance of telecommunications and the role the destruction of the network played in the collapse of the front.

In a special ‘hall’ there are telegrams from the Asia Minor Campaign and telegrams from refugees, coming mainly from the countryside and their main destination as refugees, Macedonia. Refugees faced problems with the local inhabitants and redistribution of land.

The exhibition ends with the development of telephony in Greece. Visitors can browse ‘halls’ with various types of telephone devices from the 1920s and watch videos of people using telecommunications that ‘wrote our history’.

To create this virtual tour, the Telecommunications Museum collaborated with the Athens War Museum, the Digital Museum of Nea Smyrni, the Eleftherios Venizelos Museum, OPANDA, the Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation at AUTH, the Municipality of Thessaloniki History Centre, and the ERT Archive.