Chapter II · Anakasia
Ανακασιά · Anakasia
The Kontos Mansion · Iolkos, Magnesia
The place in history
Anakasia adjoins Ano Volos on the lower slopes of Pelion and forms part of the historic Iolkos landscape. Like its neighboring settlements, it flourished through milling, crafts, agriculture, and regional trade during the nineteenth century.
For the maternal family story, Anakasia is not a footnote to Ano Volos but one of three connected home places. Its surviving mansions preserve the domestic world in which Pelion families lived, worked, and remembered their past.
Theophilos · 1912
The Kontos Mansion and its painted rooms
The three-storey Kontos Mansion, originally associated with the Hatzianastasis family and acquired by miller Yiannis Kontos in 1905, combines a stone-built base with a lighter timber-framed upper floor, projecting sachnisia, and a slate roof.
In 1912 Theophilos Hatzimihail painted the upper salon. Fourteen inscribed scenes evoke the Greek Revolution of 1821, accompanied by hunting, floral, equestrian, and Pelion landscape imagery. Damaged by the 1955 earthquakes, the protected monument was acquired and conserved by the Ministry of Culture and now serves as the Theophilos Museum.
Αρχοντικό
House · inheritance · memory
Landmarks
- 1
Kontos Mansion · Theophilos Museum
The protected archontiko preserves Theophilos’s 1912 mural cycle in its upper-floor salon.
- 2
Tzoanos Mansion
A second surviving mansion that records Anakasia’s prosperous nineteenth-century built heritage.
- 3
The Iolkos hillside
The closely connected settlement landscape between Ano Volos, Anakasia, and the ascent toward Makrinitsa.
Archives & sources
- Greek Ministry of Culture — Kontos Mansion
Official monument record describing the building, Theophilos’s murals, earthquake damage, restoration, and protection history.
- Municipality of Volos — Theophilos Museum
Municipal cultural record for the museum and the painted Kontos Mansion in Anakasia.
- Municipality of Volos — Iolkos history
Local history of the connected Ano Volos and Anakasia settlement landscape.