Sending letters had a much bigger importance in the past than nowadays, with the advanced communication opportunities that we have now, we are almost sure that sending letters is another activity dumped by the modern men.
However, letters were especially important during distressed times of war, when the soldiers were away from home and a letter from the front was the one sign that they are fine.
During the Second World War, there was one kind of folded letter that had the most significance among all letters that postman had brought: the triangular folded letter. When the postman would bring a triangular letter that meant the soldier on the eastern front is still alive.
No, the triangular fold was not because the soldiers were practicing their origami skills or some sort of secret communication code. The triangular fold was a result of the shortage on postcards and envelopes in the eastern front. So in the first months of the war, the Soviet soldiers invented a new format that was a letter and its own envelope in one.
There was not only a lack of envelopes and postcards but, the soldiers were in a deficit on paper also, so they had to use their creativity and wrote letters on a page torn from a booklet, a cigarette paper, the wide margins of a newspaper, basically on anything that it could be written on. Therefore, there wasn’t enough space for long and bulky letters, so the soldiers would simply assure their close ones that they are fine, doodled something and then folded it up.
The folding process is very similar to how we, in our childhood, folded our soldier’s shako.
The triangular letters had another advantage: the content was easy to check, so it was forbidden to seal them in any way. The censors that were working on the front were searching the letters to prevent any potential revealing of the military movements and plans.
The blog RIowang dug up a special collection of triangular fold letters, that belonged to Yakov Lazirovich Ashurov from Azerbaijan. Ashurov was born in Baku in 1924, joined the army at the age of seventeen, and was killed in Stalingrad in 1942. His letters addressed to his parents were written in the Iranian Tat (Juhuri) language.
However, letters were especially important during distressed times of war, when the soldiers were away from home and a letter from the front was the one sign that they are fine.
During the Second World War, there was one kind of folded letter that had the most significance among all letters that postman had brought: the triangular folded letter. When the postman would bring a triangular letter that meant the soldier on the eastern front is still alive.
The folding process is very similar to how we, in our childhood, folded our soldier’s shako.
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