The castle

The castle of Ioannina encloses the whole old town on the promontory, and it is not a monument you visit and leave — people live in it, there are houses and lanes and shops inside the walls.

Two citadels stand within it. Its Kale, at the southeastern corner, was Ali Pasha's own compound and holds the Fethiye Mosque, his tomb, the Byzantine Museum and the Silversmithing Museum, which occupies the restored bastion.

At the northwestern corner, the Aslan Pasha Mosque sits above the lake with its complex of buildings around it, and houses the municipal museum.

Between them are the Soufari Sarai, a cavalry school Ali Pasha built between 1815 and 1820, now the state archives, and the old Turkish library.

Ali Pasha

Ali Pasha seized the governorship of Ioannina in 1788 while its holder was away on campaign, and the Sultan, faced with the fact, confirmed it — and added authority over territory well beyond Epirus.

For the next thirty-four years he ran what was effectively an independent state. He built, he taxed, he negotiated directly with Britain and France, and he was ruthless in a way that made him famous across Europe. Byron visited him and wrote about it.

In 1820 the Sultan moved against him. Ali negotiated, was promised amnesty, and withdrew to the monastery of Agios Panteleimon on the island in the lake. In January 1822 Ottoman agents shot him there through the floorboards from the room below, and sent his head to Constantinople.

The bullet holes in the floor are still there. The house is a museum.

The Jewish quarter

Ioannina had a Romaniote Jewish community — Greek-speaking Jews whose presence here goes back many centuries, distinct from the Sephardic communities elsewhere in Greece.

They lived inside the castle, and the synagogue in the walls survives. Almost the entire community was deported in 1944 and very few returned.

The museums

The Archaeological Museum holds the finds from ancient Epirus, including the lead tablets from Dodoni on which people wrote their questions to the oracle.

The Silversmithing Museum, in the castle, explains the craft that made the city's name — Ioannina silverwork supplied much of the Ottoman Balkans, and the workshops are still in the streets below.

The lake and the island

Lake Pamvotida is shallow, reed-fringed and full of birds, and a path runs along the city's waterfront for several kilometres.

In the middle of it is the Island — a village of a few hundred people with no cars and five monasteries on it, reached by boat from the waterfront in about ten minutes. One of those monasteries is where Ali Pasha died, and his house is the museum there.

Perama Cave

Four kilometres from the centre, under the hill of Goritsa, the Perama Cave covers 14,800 square metres. The visitor route is 1,100 metres long and passes through nineteen chambers, with a height difference of about twenty-five metres between entrance and exit. A tour takes about forty-five minutes.

It was the first cave in Greece developed for visitors, and in 1956 it produced the first fossil bones and teeth of cave bear ever found in the country.

Beyond the city

Ioannina is the gateway to the mountains. Zagori and the Vikos Gorge are an hour north, Metsovo forty-five minutes east, and the Tzoumerka an hour south.

Epirus is the pie country of Greece, and Ioannina is its capital. The pastry is rolled by hand and the fillings change with the season — wild greens, leeks, pumpkin, cheese, or nothing but cheese. They are eaten at any hour of the day.

The dairy is the other half of it: feta, hard sheep's cheeses and thick yoghurt from the mountain flocks.

Ioannina also makes baklava and the syrup sweets of the Ottoman tradition, and the shops that sell them are institutions. Kontosouvli, pork slow-turned on a long spit, is the meat dish.

The drink is tsipouro, ordered with small plates in the tavernas around the castle.