House in Bakovka

"How I loved the old Bakovka, the ancestral home of the Costakis family - this house with its warm burning stove, with its gramophone and with a large table in the living room, at which, at times the family, nearly thirty of us sat down." (from the memoirs of Mikhail Costakis).

According to George Costakis, the house in the village of Bakovka (Odintsovo district), was bought by his father in the mid-1920s after several attempts to settle in the Moscow region (before that there was a house in Nemchinovka). After the death of Dionisy Spiridonovich, the main rooms of the house were occupied by Elena Emmanuilovna, the mother of the collector who ran the household. George Costakis wrote: “my mother lived in Bakovka, with my younger brother Mitya and his family, she died being 98, nearly a century old.”

All members of the Costakis family recall the days spent in Bakovka with incredible warmth. This house also became an artistic Mecca, where Anatoly Zverev and other artists created hundreds of graphic works, where musicians and scientists came to visit, where rare icons and paintings of non-conformists hung on the walls. That is why the fire in Bakovka, which happened in 1976 and destroyed half of the house (Costakis was adamant that the arson was organised by the special services), became a real tragedy for Georgy Dionisovich and a reason for emigration.