Autumn in Koukouli. The beech forest turns copper from the top of the mountain down, and we light the first fire.
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Anastasios Hatzigakis built it in 1872 to show the valley how well the wool trade had gone. It stood empty from 1968. Katerina bought it in 2013 from eleven cousins, and it took four years to make it a house again.
Anastasios Hatzigakis, who sold Zagori wool and cheese as far as Bucharest, builds the house on the lower edge of Koukouli: three floors, walls ninety centimetres thick, a painted reception room at the top.
Epirus becomes part of Greece. The trade roads north close one by one, and the family’s business shrinks to the valley.
The last Hatzigakis moves to Ioannina. The house is locked, and the roof slowly lets the weather in.
Katerina finds it with a fig tree growing through the first floor, and buys it that winter from eleven cousins.
Four years of restoration, stone by stone: every slate lifted, numbered and relaid; the painted ceiling cleaned with bread and cotton; lime plaster, never cement.
Oxya opens with nine rooms in May. Kanela arrives in September.
The same view, eleven years apart. The rule for the restoration was Katerina’s and simple: keep everything that could be kept, and where something had to be new, make it the way the old one was made.
Stores at the bottom, family in the middle, the best rooms at the top where the air and the views are. It is how every big Zagori house was built, and we left it that way.
Katerina drew buildings in Athens for nineteen years, mostly other people’s offices. She came to Koukouli for a walking weekend in 2013, saw the house with a fig tree growing out of the upper floor, and bought it that winter. She ran the restoration herself, four years of it, with two masons from Konitsa and a carpenter who had only ever worked on churches. She does the rooms, the walks and the maps, and she will tell you which beam is original if you ask.
Petros grew up in Tsepelovo, an hour up the mountain, and cooked in Ioannina and then in Thessaloniki before he followed Katerina here. Breakfast is his: three pies a morning, rolled by hand, from his grandmother’s notebook. He picks the herbs for the tea on the slope behind the church and is not interested in anybody else’s opinion of oregano.
Petros’s grandmother kept forty years of pies in a school exercise book with a blue cover: leek, nettle, pumpkin, the one with rice and milk for Sundays. She died in 2011. The book lives on the shelf by the oven, and it is the only thing in the kitchen nobody else is allowed to touch.
A shepherd dog of uncertain parents, the colour of cinnamon, found on the Vikos path as a puppy in 2019. She meets every car, walks the first kilometre of any walk with you and then turns back, and sleeps in front of the winter room’s fire from October.