Kastoria (1969)

The third part of the informal “excursion” to Macedonia – that began with Macedonian Wedding (1960) and continued with Thasos (1961) – Kastoria, with its foreign traveler on horseback seeking a fairy in the modern but rather timeless everyday life of the Macedonian city, closes a perfect cycle of uncompromising documentation right as the curtain rings down on the 1960s. Takis Kanellopoulos has now definitively exchanged history for myth (and its representation), and here he uses it as a bridge between past and present, finally mythologizing a city which, through his gaze, regains anew the characteristics of a rare Greekness, carved from Byzantine ghosts, ancient Greek outbursts, materials of soil and water that are stateless yet deeply rooted in a Greece that remains to be discovered.