Visiting the mountainous villages of the municipality of Koresteia is a like visiting the forgotten history of modern Greece.
Known also as “mud-brick villages”, Koresteia is a group of mountainous settlements (Ano and Kato Kraniona, Melas, Halara, Makrohori, Mavrokambos, Agios Antonios, Gavros, Kottas and Vatohori), mainly on the road connecting Kastoria with Prespes.
Built on mountain Vitsi, they create together with the misty, filled with beeches, mountain slopes a deeply nostalgic landscape, resembling a scenery from a film. It is no accident that internationally acclaimed film directors like Theodoros Angelopoulos and Pantelis Voulgaris chose this location as the basis of scenes from their most iconic films “The Suspended Step of the Stork” and “Soul Deep”.
Here one can see mud-brick houses, built in the beginning of the previous century from poor people on the border, who lived far from the prosperity of the fur merchants of Kastoria.
The area’s villages started to decline from the 1940s, when the people living there immigrated abroad seeking a better future. At another village of the area, Melas, visitors can see the house where the hero of the Macedonian Struggle, Pavlos Melas, died in 1904 after a betrayal of the some people of the village, who informed the Turkish army.
