It is a regular series of stamps with new values printed after the exhaustion of the original ones or with the change of postage rates and colour changes. The series has 9 issues but with the variations it has reached a total of 23 stamps. It is the largest single series in Greece in terms of stamp count.

The chosen stamp depicts Emmanuel Xanthos (1772-1852), a personality who, due to his actions and his origins, is associated with two important events that took place in March.

The first event is the declaration of the Revolution in 1821. Emmanuel Xanthos, together with Nikolaos Skoufas and Athanasios Tsakalov, founded in 1814 in Odessa, Russia, the secret revolutionary organisation called the Society of Friends. Its aim was to coordinate and organize the efforts of the enslaved Greeks for their liberation from the Ottoman Empire.

The second event has to do with Xanthos' birthplace, Patmos. The islands of the Dodecanese, including Patmos, have known many conquerors in their history: the Knights Hospitallers in 1309, the Ottoman Turks in 1522, the Italians in 1912, the German army and the British. The latter had control of the Dodecanese for a time until they became part of the Greek state with the official incorporation ceremony that took place on 7 March 1948.