Biomedical doctors = The practical doctors of Zagori

This is the name of the famous practical doctors of Zagori, who treated people and animals with medicinal plants and herbs exclusively of the flora of the gorge. From the very old years, they maintained their reputation until the first decades of the 20th century. In fact, in the 18th and 19th c. their fame had spread to all the Balkan countries and Asia Minor. They went so far as to hold very high positions as medical advisers to the sultans, such as the Kapesovo Paschaloglou, who served not only as a doctor but also as a secret adviser to Sultans Abdul Hamid A, Suleiman III and Mustafa D ΄.

Dressed in black wool (seguna), their long hair tied with a green ribbon and wearing a peculiar hat, they gathered herbs on the mountain slopes and rode on horseback from village to village, covering the lack of a doctor. They were also called matsoukades, from the rod (matsouki) they always had with them, sackcloths, from the bags in which they carried their miraculous herbs, and kombogiannites from "knot", which means fraud, and the synthetic Ioannitis. They were a kind of brotherhood and passed on their knowledge to their sons. It is said, in fact, that to protect their guild they used a peculiar linguistic idiom. At a time when in Greece of 900,000 inhabitants (1841) there were only 90 medical scientists, they were given the opportunity to obtain a license to practice medicine, after six months of study at the Medical School.

It is also said that two psychiatrists, Pantazis Exarchou and Zonias, healed the wounds of the sick with mold, many years before Fleming announced the miraculous properties of mold in the composition of penicillin. Of the 1,750 species of herbs recorded in the area by the French botanist Pierre Otier a few years ago, some are still used today, such as the hellebore cycloaf, also known as mad grass or scab, with which local shepherds heal the wounds of animals.