Quite some time ago, in October 1997 to be exact, we started a very simple little site on the internet, dedicated to our guitar hero Criss Oliva. We started the site, because in our opinion there was very little info about him on the official website of his band, Savatage. The material we started the site with was next to nothing ; Bryan was in posession of some pictures of Criss and some other stuff, and Ellen came up with some articles and the Savatage Legends special issue from the German magazine RockHard.

But eventually, the site flourished and grew, thanks to the contributions of many of Criss' fans, and not in the last place thanks to Steve Wacholz, who contributed a lot of material that he had gathered during the years that he was a member of Savatage. Thanks to our good friend Nanne Andersson our knowledge of HTML and webdesign grew, and the site's appearance changed a couple of times.

Because the site was so much appreciated, we kept coming up with new ideas how to make the site an even better memorial for Criss. Even some of the (ex-)members of the band Savatage, as well as Criss' parents offered their help in contributing their memories of the days spent with him.

There was even a time when the site resided as part of the official Savatage website. But because of some problems we experienced trying to get our pages uploaded to the site, we decided to continue on our own. We do realize that being part of the official website has given the site an enormous push in the right direction and we thank Nathan Bradley for having put up with us.

During the many months we spent working on the site, we had collected a lot of material. Piled together, it would be enough to build a Savatage museum. And thinking along the line of the museum idea, we thought of expanding the site into not just a memorial for Criss Oliva, but also a historical document of the band Savatage that he was the major ingredient of.

In creating a website about the band from a historical point of view, we are hoping to establish an entity on the internet that can stand the ravages of time so Criss and his music can forever be remembered.

We realize, that there may be some controversy on the subject of the domain name we have chosen. Once again we would like to emphasize that we in no way wish to disdain the current band Savatage by using this name. We are sorry if anyone feels offended by the domain name, but we think that the content of the site speaks for itself in showing that our intentions are nothing but positive.

Our hopes are, that in the future the site will continue to grow and that it will be just as much appreciated by the fans as the Criss Oliva website always has been in the past. After all, we are doing this for the memory of the greatest guitarist of all time, who was sadly taken away from us much too soon :

Christopher Michael Oliva

We hope that this site will contribute to the preservation of his memory and that some day he will get the recognition he deserves so much, but never got during his lifetime.

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Thanks again to all of his dedicated fans, friends and relatives.

The maintainers of this website :

Bryan Holland and Ellen Bakvis

E-mail : admin@savintage.com