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The old post office of Molista

Molista, Konitsa region, Epirus / Western Greece

By Desolation Road

July 20^th, 2020

Among the restored stone houses and mansions of the 19th century of Molista village stands one of the first post offices that operated in Epirus, inaugurated back in 1913. Together with its telegraph and telephone services, the post office provided for decades the only connection of the people of Molista and the surrounding villages with their immigrant relatives living in the cities or abroad.

The prominent Molistans at Bucharest may have excelled as businessmen and merchants in the early 1900s, but this came with a great cost: back at Molista, their children were growing up without them. When the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos visited the Romanian capital, they gave him a warm welcome - with an important request: to set up a post office in Molista, so that they could send supplies and remittances to their families.

Thus, in 1913 Molista became the first village to have a post office in the region, the cluster of the enchanting stone villages called Mastorochoria (meaning villages of stone craftsmen) at the foot of the Grammos and Smolikas mountains, at the northern tip of the Pindos mountain range.

After the first post office of the nearest town, Konitsa, opened in 1877, it took almost 40 years for the villages of this area to acquire their own. Thus, from 1913 the post office of Molista served the needs of its inhabitants, together with six regional villages (Staritsiani, Kerasovo, Fourka, Lagada, Kantsiko, Kastaniani).

From 1913, when it was inaugurated, until 1983, the post office was housed on the upper floor of the main building in Molista Square, above the village cafe. When a devastating fire destroyed it in 1983, the villagers temporarily housed it in the area of the former Gendarmerie Station (the Gendarmerie had already ceased to exist in Greece), and then in anoother stone building.

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

From then until 1998, when it was permanently shut down, the post office was located on the ground floor of the building, while upstairs a small square room with furniture, a fireplace, a sink etc housed its employee. In earlier decades the employees were two: a supervisor and a postman who distributed letters, parcels, checks and telegrams.

The postman did the deliveries to the surrounding villages every two days, by foot or on horseback, usually spending the night in the village of Fourka. This was often a dangerous duty - especially when the weather in the mountain passages of Pindos was getting rough. It was not uncommon for the surrounding villagers to provide help to the postman, and to offer him accommodation, when the mountains were swept by rains, wild winds and snowstorms.

The post office covered four different needs: posting, telegraphy, telephony and, later, banking services. The locals used the post office for sending and receiving letters, parcels and checks (with exchange restrictions on what was coming from abroad). At the telegraph station, each telegraph sent was charged by the word, and therefore telegraphs have always been concise.

The telephone station was a small booth where conversations took place by appointment, while the savings bank provided deposit, withdrawal, savings services and loans, plus the payment of pensions, allowances and compensations by the state. A Board of Auditors often controlled the management of remittances by postal employees, but there was never any corruption in Molista.

In the 1920s and '30s the surrounding villages –at first the big central villages and then the smaller ones- gradually acquired telegraph offices, and in the 1950s-'60s a telephone, usually based at a social gathering place such as the coffee shop, the barber’s shop, the grocery store or the community office.

The Molista Post Office ceased operations for long periods in the 1940s, due to World War II and then the Greek Civil War (1946-49). When the latter ended it resumed its operations, up until the 1980s. At that time the first private applications for home telephones began, but securing a line required a long bureaucratic process, great expenses and a lot of luck.

But, after WW2 and the Civil War left Epirus in total ruins, and its people on the verge of extreme poverty in a mountainous, rocky landscape, most of them in the following decades left -together with their families- for the cities, anyway.

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

The old post office of Molista

[Sources: ‘Konitsa’ magazine, May 2015-June 2016 / Dimitrios Papalambros, Deputy Gen. Manager of the Hellenic Post Office / G. & Ch. Goutos, Ch. Christidis]

Footnotes

Text & photography Copyright: Desolation Road / Panos Diamantis

FootNotes

Text & photography Copyright: Desolation Road / Panos Diamantis

© 2026 Desolation Road

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