Vourbiani village in the northern part of Western Greece, home to maybe less that 60 people nowadays, was at its heyday at the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Built in the slopes of Grammos mount and in close proximity to the Albanian border on the East, the village was counting about 350 families in 1870. Still a part of the Ottman empire back then, since Vourbiani joined Greece after the Balkan wars of 1912-’13, it was the second largest settlement of the area after the city of Konitsa, 35 km down the map.
Being one of the "Mastorochoria", the villages of the famous stone craftsmen, Vourbiani lived its golden days by the wealth of the craftsmen travelling in groups in Greece and the other neighboring countries to build stone houses and buildings, and tremendously detailed wooden ceilings.
The growth of the village in the late 19th century was such that Vourbiani was the only village in the wider area that had three main churches, a military base and a middle school.
The first middle school of Vourbiani was built during 1885-’88 by the charities of the Athens-based Philantropic Brotherhood of Vourbianites, which also provided for the books and the stationary. The school was rebuilt in 1929 after a landslide.
For decades the "Scholarcheio" of Vourbiani functioned as a middle school, a girls school, later a males school and also as a boarding school for poor children of the area. Responsible for its function was the ordained in charge of the Metropolis of Vella and Konitsa.
Vourbiani was at the heart of the Greco-Italian war, during WW2, and also of the Greek Civil War of 1946-’49. At the yard of the school a sign under the steel bust of teacher Charalambos Rembelis, born in Vourbiani in 1887, reads: “Slaughtered by the communist gangsters in Grammos in 1947”. It seems that the wounds have not, yet, healed.
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