Pavlos Melas Museum

The village of Melas is located on the mountain Vitsi and at a distance of 16 km from the provincial road Florina-Kastoria via Korestia. This village, which was called Statista, was renamed Melas in order to honour Pavlos Melas, who died there in 1904 in a skirmish with a Turkish military detachment. The house where Melas was killed, the Kantzakis house, was converted into a museum and is kept as it was when Melas was killed.
The house is a representative building of the local architecture of the villages of the historical area of Korestia. It is a two-storey building due to the slope of the ground, where the ground floor is built with stone walls, the first floor with lightweight brick materials and a four-tiered wooden tiled roof. The few openings unite the heavy wall construction and give a fortress-like form to the volume of the building. The interiors of the museum retain the interior layout and form of an early 20^th-century folk house in the Korestia region, preserving the space as it existed during the Ottoman detachment’s operation. On display are personal belongings of the Katzaki family, weapons from the Macedonian Struggle, uniforms of the Macedonian Freedom fighters and photographs of the Macedonian Freedom fighters who operated in the area between Kastoria and Florina. The importance of the museum lies not so much in its exhibits, but more in the events that took place during that crucial historical period.