‘Sun! and my golden dream, if one day you’d rise no longer cowardly and cold, as up to now, but fiery and ferocious, to melt all the eternal snows that cover the peaks of Pindos and Souli and Heimarra, to warm and revive their icy guts, the obsolete youth and their bravery can then emerge in the midst of their post-spring flowers.’
Although novelist and poet Costas Krystallis was only 26 years old when tuberculosis defeated him, in 1894, the above excerpt of one of his most renown poems shows why he was described as a poet of nature and mountains and a praiser of freedom and the struggle of the Greeks against the Ottoman conquerors.
Chased by the Ottomans, modest, romantic and heavily nostalgic for his homeland, he fled to Athens when his poem "Shadows of Hades", which he wrote as a minor for his deceased mother (from tuberculosis, too), angered the Ottomans. Immediately, the young Krystallis managed to stand out in the literary circles of the capital.
Krystallis was born in this house of the remote mountain village of Syrrako in Tzoumerka in 1868 to the daily amanes of the Imams, under the snow-covered peaks of Mount Peristeri. Death prevented him from seeing his homeland free, in 1912, but he managed to leave a wide wealth of prose and poetry. "I, too, a child of the village, a child and I of the sheepfold, as many times as I go to the plains, mountains, sheepfolds, villages and plows and rivers, such are the songs I sing," he wrote.
His home was purchased in 1950 by a merchant of Syrrako in Paris called George Bundas, who later donated it to the Community. Since 1997, it has been operating as a museum of the author and local folklore, as well as a library. The courtyard is adorned by Kostas Krystallis’ bust.
Visiting the museum of Kostas Krystallis
Syrrako is located 52 km southeast of Ioannina and, together with the opposite village of Kalarrytes, overlooks a steep valley of Pindos, at an altitude of 1200 meters above the river Chrousia, a tributary of Kalarrytikos river. To visit the museum, especially during the winter, you may have to consult the villagers on the spot.
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