I used Egyptians for my Turks. You can file down the fezzes to something about pillbox cap high, and paint that white for Albanian infantry. The Guard Zouaves shown in one of the photos were lovely, but they spent the war in Constantinople.
The plate is quite nice (I may steal a copy though I have a similar picture), but many of those are dress uniforms, not the way the Greeks appeared in the field.
This war fell in the golden age of the war correspondents, but frankly, the first half of 1897 was pretty dull, so the big names went to Greece that spring. Going To War In Greece by Frederick Palmer and A Year From a Reporter's Notebook by Richard Harding Davis both have some good photos from the field. The Illustrated London News has lots of great drawings that show things uniform plates never do, like the braid pattern on the top of the kepis.
Davis and Stephen Crane both came home and wrote fiction about the war. Not exactly the sort of material that makes it into literature classes, I'm afraid, but useful for our purposes. This was an era when stage descriptions were given in excruciating detail, so Davis' play "The Galloper," in the book Farces, is worth reading. Crane includes some good details in his novel Active Service.
On campaign, the evzones wore a blue coat over the white uniform in your plate (which is very much like the uniform they wear to this day when posting guard in front of the tomb of the Unknown Soldiers in Athens). I got Eureka to make evzones in the blue coats as part of their 100 Club project some years ago. As was the case with most armies, officers bought their uniforms, while enlisted personnel were issued uniforms. Officers seemingly didn't stay with a unit for long, so they didn't waste their money on fancy evzone uniforms, and the Eureka officer is in standard Greek infantry uniform.
As nnascati says, the uniforms have a Franco-Prussian War look to them. Back in the 1880s, the French had sent a military mission to train the Greeks, so I tended towards French figures. My gunners are Foundry Franco-Prussian War French Artillery. One infantry platoon is led by a Foundry WWI French officer, who is a bit on the short side. Three of the infantry companies are conversions of Foundry Mexicans from their Maximillian line. I did some carving so the rifles looked more like bolt action Gras rifles than muzzleloaders and squared up the kepis with green stuff. The fourth company is made of Balkan War Greeks from Alphacast (sadly out of production now). Photographs I've seen have the trousers legs hanging free, without gaiters/spats. They also wore a shorter jacket, more like something from the ACW.
As for the cavalry, I boughy mine back in the olden days when Foundry sold horses and riders separately, so I got FPW French horses and Prussian husssars. I might rethink that if I had to do it again, since I don't think they wore the braid across their chests on campaign. I had to file the fur caps down to kepis, adding a brim. Make sure you get some dismounted cavalry: the Greeks bought plenty of new horses for all three regiments in 1888 or so, then didn't replace those that died over the intervening years. They made a last minute effort to buy horses in 1897, but didn't have enough, so some of the cavalry units walked.
If you would like to veg out and watch a movie that has a number of historical inaccuracies, get a copy of the made-for-TV film The First Olympics, the only movie I know of that shows Greek soldiers in the uniform of the period.
I've scanned in a bunch of photos and drawings over the years, contact me at edgington52 at comcast dot net, and I will send you some.
Finally, a word of caution from somebody who charged right in: if you do the Greeks (God bless'em), you are chosing to model what may well be the worst army in late 19th Century Europe.
Grelber
has been watching some documentaries lately set in the Western Desert, and was inspired to create this...
