Foreign Insulators
by Marilyn Albers

Reprinted from "INSULATORS - Crown Jewels of the Wire", February 1981, page 4

Insulators from Greece 

I feel very fortunate to have two whole live insulators from Greece, at last! I remember seeing one like these on a sales table at the 1979 National Show in Denver, and assuming it was for sale, asked, "How much?" The answer came back, "You can't buy just one. You have to buy everything on the table." That statement, after it finally sank in, was the worst pain known to medical science! But I have wanted one, fiercely, ever since, and I have cried a lot. 

The two you see pictured below are nearly identical in shape.

The one on the left came to me from John McDougald, who got it from Mary (Mrs. William) Barber of Battle Creek, Michigan. Mary had hand carried this back from a trip to Greece. She told me it was from the Island of Rhodes, which is part of the Dodecanese region of the Aegean Islands and considered a part of Greece. The underglaze ink marking is a beautiful peacock blue. Perhaps the picture is clear enough for you to see the rather bold letters OTE on the skirt. There is also a logo stamped on top of the crown which mystifies me. This same sort of "triple stacker Christmas tree" also appears an an incuse marking on a German railroad insulator I have. My guess is that it is the logo of the manufacturer. Anybody else out there with a crystal ball besides Jack Tod?

On skirt

On dome

As I was cleaning this insulator I was surprised to find a coil of hair (human?) up inside the pinhole -- just as there was in several of the German insulators I wrote about in the September 1980 issue of Crown Jewels. This leads me to believe that maybe using hair for this purpose -- to snug the iron pin tighter inside the pinhole of the insulator -- is not as gross or unusual as I first thought. I told Mary Barber of my discovery, and her comment was, "Ugh! I'm glad I didn't know it while I still had the insulator!" I'm glad you didn't know it, too, Mary, because you would probably have beat it to death with a stick! 

On skirt

The other insulator, on the right, also has the OTE marking, but in an olive green ink. Above it appears the letters Ar in a triangle within a circle. I don't know this logo, either; but, again, it is probably the signature of the manufacturer, and a different one from that on the first insulator. The Ar logo appears also on a white porcelain from Yugoslavia. Both these insulators were brought back from Europe by Gene Calman.

Frank Feher (Sacramento, California) has an insulator identical to the one on the right in the picture. He says his came from the town of Almiropotamon (meaning Salt River) on the Greek Island of Evvoia, and that OTE stands for Organization of Telephones of Ellas. Why Ellas instead of the word Hellas -- the ancient word for Greece and the one we most often see? Because Ellas is the modern word for Greece. Officially it is Vasilion tis Elladhos (Kingdom of Greece). 

Since both insulators bear a manufacturer's logo dissimilar from each other, and Greece is not well equipped for industrialization because it lacks large reserves of power and suitable raw materials in quantity, except cotton, it is logical to assume that these insulators were made in another country (perhaps two others) and imported to Greece. If anyone can add any information on these markings, please let me know!