A handwritten Greek letter from Father John Aslanides (Archimandrite Ι. Ασλανίδης) at 125 Pleasant Street, Brockton, Massachusetts, dated August 29, 1933. Addressed to “the Director of Aletheia, 344 W 27 St NYNY” — the editor of the Greek-American newspaper Αλήθεια (“The Truth”) at its New York office at 344 West 27th Street.
The letter is a polite subscriber complaint. A month earlier (late July 1933) Father Aslanides had sent a $3.00 postal money order to subscribe for one year, with instructions to deliver to his new Brockton address. By the time he wrote, no issues had arrived.
“I sent you a postal money order for $3.00 with instructions to enroll me as a subscriber to Aletheia for one year, but to date no issue of it has been sent to me at my new address. Please kindly send me the issue published.”
Modest as the content is, the letter places two facts in the public record:
- Aletheia (Αλήθεια) is confirmed identical to “The Truth” Greek bi-weekly newspaper — same address (344 W 27 St NYC) as the December 1933 multi-clergy declaration page in Lazaros’s archive (the file titled
truth-newspaper-clergy-signatures-1933). - Aletheia had a nationwide Greek-American subscriber base including Orthodox clergy as far north as Brockton, Massachusetts. It was not just a New York Bronx-faction broadside; it was a regional Greek-language newspaper reaching the dispersed Greek-American community in the Northeast.
The letter is addressed to the newspaper’s Director, not to Lazaros — yet it ended up in Lazaros’s papers, suggesting Lazaros may have had a business- or editorial-side role at Aletheia in addition to being a member of the December 1933 NYC organizing committee for the anti-Athenagoras rally. Subscriber complaints would naturally reach someone managing the publication’s operations.