“The Image” and “The Notepad of Gerokalamennios” are two narratives, the common element of which is Gerokalamennios, who appears as a co-protagonist in the first and as a record-keeper of the memorable events of the period 1821-1881 in the second. It is not only the Greeks and the Arvanites, who in the first narrative emotional confess that they are brothers “from the old Epirians,” but also the striking Zois the Azoiros, who, after having strived for greatness in his youth, chose in his later years to earn his bread “through his own sweat and with honesty, and not with lies and injustice,” while in the second, the brief records of Gerokalamennios, who died in sorrow because “he did not see his homeland free,” depict in subdued tones the conditions of servitude of the people of Ioannina.

Kostas Krystallis, the hunted nobleman of Syrrako, the poet who froze in the desolation of Athens, with the few writings he left us, gave us the measure of an art that cannot fit into the elegant underestimation of “ethnography,” but also of a debt that he refused to pawn in the vulgarity of the “national center.”