Anna Mela-Papadopoulou

The honorary title "The Soldier's Mother" was also attributed, in later years, to other distinguished nurses of the Greek Red Cross as a medallion, to commemorate her.

She left her two teenaged children to her husband's care and the village in Euboea, where he was the local landlord and where she had always devoted herself to welfare activities and she returned to Athens to work in larger charity schemes.

She served in the Greek Army, at the war front, for a decade (1912–1922) throughout the two Balkan Wars, the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus Struggle, the Great War in Serbia, (Scopje) and the Asia Minor Campaign[2] For her work in Serbia as Head of the newly founded Greek Red Cross she was awarded in December 1914 with the Silver Cross of the Order of the Redeemer by the Greek State and in spring of 1915 with the Serbian Medal of Saint Andrew by the Serb King and with the Cross of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, for her services to the wounded and ill Serb soldiers and their Austrian captives.

[3] She dedicated her post-war life to the struggle against tuberculosis from which the refugees from the Asia Minor Disaster but also the retired fighters suffered.

In 1927, she travelled to Egypt and the United States of America and visited the Greek Communities there, to raise funds for the construction of a Sanatorium in the Peloponnese at Korfoxilia,[4] in Arcadia, near Vytina and Magouliana.