When Lord Byron visited Ioannina in 1809, he travelled for three days from Preveza, on the coast, with an entourage of servants, guards, an interpreter and ten horses, carrying beds and linen with them, among many other necessities. I travelled with a rucksack by bus from Igoumenitsa, having first taken the ferry from Corfu, and was in Ioannina in time for lunch. Travel is less arduous today, and less romantic.
When Byron visited, Ioannina was the capital of Ali Pasha Tepelena, the Albanian despot who controlled a large territory, including most of present-day Greece, southern Albania, and the south-west corner of Macedonia. Nominally subject to the Sultan, Ali Pasha ruled largely autonomously in his domain. Arriving at the town, the first impression of Byron’s companion, John Cam Hobhouse, was almost fairy-tale: ‘The houses, domes and minarets, glittering through gardens of orange and lemon trees, and from groves of cypress – the lake spreading its smooth expanse at the foot of the city – the mountains rising abruptly from the banks of the lake – all these burst at once upon us...’ The impression was marred by the sight of the severed arm of an executed robber hanging by a finger on a piece of string from a tree as they approached the town.
Another British traveller who visited Ioannina not long after Byron and Hobhouse was the Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes, a Cambridge don, who published an account of his travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania in 1821. Approaching the city, he described it as having a noble appearance, crowned with palaces and mosques. The palace of Ali Pasha, and those of his two sons, were, he wrote, in the best Turkish style of architecture, bursting on the sight with great magnificence. Like Byron and Hobhouse, Hughes’s party stayed in the house of Niccolo Argyri. Hughes tells how Ali Pasha, on the death of Argyri’s wealthy father, had appropriated most of his property, which, fearing for his life, Argyri had been unable to oppose. As a result, he was left with a fine house in Ioannina, in which Ali Pasha had ordered him to accommodate the British guests, but with hardly the means to maintain it. This was not an uncommon fate for the city’s Greek merchants. Hughes met one of them, the richest in the city, who had built a house so splendid that Ali Pasha had seized it for his nephew, banishing the merchant and his family from the town.
Like Byron, Hughes was received by Ali Pasha, who at the time was assiduously courting every British visitor, hoping to gain territorial advantage, perhaps an Ionian island, having bet on them during the wars with the French. Hughes, like Byron and Hobhouse, had heard much of the tyrant’s cruelties, including his penchant for roasting alive, impaling and skinning those who crossed him. Not long before Byron’s arrival, Antonis Katsantonis, the leader of a rebel band that had long been a thorn in Ali Pasha’s side, had been captured, together with his brother, Yorgos, and cruelly executed by having his bones broken with a sledge hammer. One of Ali Pasha’s most notorious acts of cruelty was the drowning in Lake Pamvotis of some 17 Greek women for alleged adultery. Among them was Kyra Frossyni, who had apparently been accused of adultery by the jealous wife of Ali Pasha’s son. Some have suggested she may also have been a mistress of Ali Pasha himself. The event was commemorated by a painting, which now features on postcards sold in souvenir shops in Ioannina.
But, as Byron had discovered, Ali Pasha had great charm when he chose. Hughes struggled to recognise the brutal tyrant when his party was received by him in Ioannina: ‘Here it is very difficult to find any traces of that bloodthirsty disposition, that ferocious appetite for revenge, that restless and inordinate ambition, that inexplicable cunning, which has marked his eventful career: the mien of his face on the contrary has an air of mildness in it, his front is open, his venerable white beard descending over his breast gives him a kind of patriarchal appearance, whilst the silvery tones of his voice, and the familiar simplicity with which he addresses his attendants, strongly aid the deception.’
As I walked from the bus station, along a road that followed the shore of Pamvotis lake towards the historic city centre, I caught my first glimpse of a minaret through the trees, and felt perhaps an echo of the excitement of earlier travellers. Ioannia is nowadays a big, modern town. But the historic centre still has charm. Although the lake is polluted, one cannot tell that looking over it towards the same mountains described by Hobhouse. Walking alongside the lake, beneath the great walls of the citadel, as men sit with their fishing rods, it is still a beautiful scene.
When Byron arrived, he found a message awaiting him from the forewarned Ali Pasha, inviting him to come up and visit him in Tepelena, where he was conducting a ‘little war’, besieging Berat. While they stayed in Ioannina, they were looked after by two of Ali Pasha’s grandchildren, Byron describing the boys as ‘the prettiest little animals I ever saw’.
Ioannina was taken by Greece in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, much to the chagrin of the Albanian community there. Abdyl Frashëri, one of the founders of the League of Prizren, formed to prevent the annexation of Albanian-inhabited Ottoman territory to other newly emergent Balkan states, had been the head of the Albanian Committee of Ioannina. This sought to preserve the city and the Epirus region from inclusion in Greece. There is little sign nowadays of the once significant Albanian presence in Ioannina. A friend in Tirana told me his grandmother was originally from Ioannina, and that he still had some relatives there, although most had moved to Albania. Of those who remained, the elderly ones could still more or less speak Albanian, but the younger generation not. Expulsion or assimilation under pressure have been the lot of national minorities in Greece.
But there is still much evidence of the Ottoman past, including the bazaar area, with its narrow lanes and low houses, some dating from that period. There is also a Jewish quarter, although few Jews remain. A memorial to the Jews deported under Nazi occupation commemorates the extinction of their once flourishing community. Within the citadel walls, many of the buildings are modern. But some of the former public building remain. These include an Ottoman-era library, as well as the now-ruined and overgrown baths. Byron and Hobhouse had wanted to visit the baths, but had been put off by the sight of the elderly masseur at the entrance. Argyri told them it was a pity, as they would have been served by ‘belli Giovanni’.
Above the library and the baths stands the Aslan Pasha Mosque, now a museum, but, unusually in Greece, retaining its minaret. Following a revolt against Ottoman rule in the 17th century, the Monastery of St. John the Baptist, which had stood on the site, was demolished and replaced by the mosque, and the Christian populace, those that had not been slaughtered for their participation in the rebellion, was banished from the citadel, the ‘castro’, and forced to live outside the city walls. Following the inclusion of the city in Greece, the mosque continued to function as such until 1924, when the Muslim population was expelled as part of population exchange with Turkey that followed Greece’s ‘Asia Minor Disaster’. The abandoned Mosque was turned into a museum in 1933. Alongside the Mosque is a long, low building that had once been a Medresa.
The museum is organised into sections exhibiting artefacts from Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities, the last of these in the main part of the Mosque. It is a fine collection, amply, even generously given the historically poisonous relations between Greece and Turkey, demonstrating the once cosmopolitan nature of the city.
Among the exhibits that attracted my attention was a Damascus sword that had been presented to Georgios Karaiskakis, a klepht, insurgent against Ottoman rule, one-time commander of Ali Pasha’s personal guard, and hero of Greece’s independence war, by the British naval Captain Thomas Cochrane. The Scot Cochrane was one of Britain’s most dashing and successful naval officers during the Napoleonic Wars, and some have seen him as one of the inspirations for the fictional naval officers, C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubry. Disgraced in Britain following his conviction for his part in the Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814, he continued his seagoing career in command of the Chilean and then Brazilian navies during their respective independence wars. Then, in 1827-28 he took part in Greece’s independence war, which is when he must have presented the sword to Karaiskakis, who was killed in battle shortly after Cochrane’s arrival. Cochrane, having become the Tenth Earl of Dundonald following the death of his father, returned to the British navy as an admiral in 1832.
My attention was also drawn by the display in the Christian section of the museum of the costume of a Suliote woman. The Suliotes were a warlike people who long resisted Ottoman rule from their mountainous region to the west of Ioannina. Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians, they were in time assimilated as Greeks. At the height of their power, in the second half of the 18th century, the Suliote Confederacy was an independent territory comprising numerous villages and several thousand souls. After seizing power in Ioannina, Ali Pasha carried on a relentless war against them, eventually abandoning direct assault and resorting to siege and attrition. In 1803, the Suliotes finally capitulated and went into exile. In his usual style, Ali Pasha reneged on his promise to let them pass unmolested, and many of them were massacred. In a famous episode described by the Rev. Hughes, a group of Suliote, women trapped near the monastery of Zalango, in desperation threw their children over a steep precipice, and then, singing and dancing, whirling furiously, with a shriek they hurled themselves to their deaths.
Many of the Suliotes who escaped made it to the Ionian isles, where some entered Russian military service during the period of the Septinsular (Seven Island) Republic. When that came to an end, and the Ionian islands reverted to French control in 1807, many entered French service, including in a unit known as the Albanian Regiment. While the French hung on to Corfu until Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the other Ionian islands fell into British hands, and some Suliotes ended up in British service, in the Greek Light Infantry Regiment they formed. Byron took some of them on as his guards on Cephalonia in 1823, before he embarked for Missolonghi to take his part in the Greek independence war. Suliote warriors also featured prominently in his efforts once he got there. He penned some verses in honour of the wild, unruly and often troublesome, yet brave Suliotes, to whom he was much attached:
Up to battle! Sons of Suli –Up, and do your duty duly –
There the Wall – and there the Moat is
The Suliote identity is hard to fathom in modern terms. While they spoke Albanian, identities in the Ottoman Balkans were generally defined by religion rather than nation, and the Suliotes, like the Greeks, were Orthodox. Hughes appears to have confused religious and ethnic identity, in his account referring to Ali Pasha’s troops as ‘Albanians’, perhaps unaware that the Suliotes too were Albanian. They fought hard against Ottoman Muslim oppression, including against their fellow Albanian, Ali Pasha. But when the Sultan sent an army to subdue the recalcitrant Ali Pasha in 1820-1822, he formed an anti-Ottoman alliance with his former Suliote foes, promising them a return to their lands. Ultimately, Suliotes distinguished themselves in the Greek independence war, and in the Greek military following independence. As such, whatever their ethnic origins, they finally identified with Greece. In the small museum of the independence war on the island of Nissi, in the lake at Ioannina, are pictures of Suliote warriors in their strikingly fine costumes which so captivated Byron.
A short distance from the Aslan Pasha Mosque, on a plateau surrounded by high walls, is the former inner citadel, Its Kale, where Ali Pasha’s Seraglio used to stand. Alas, the palace that so impressed Hobhouse and Hughes was destroyed in a fire in 1870. In the place where it stood is now a Byzantine museum and a large open space. The fortifications at Ioannina go back to the Byzantine period, although they were much extended and strengthened by Ali Pasha. The austerely simple Fethiye Mosque, built at the end of the 18th century, next to the site of the palace, still stands tall, and well preserved. Next to the Mosque are the tombs of Ali Pasha and his first wife, covered by a wrought iron bird cage like structure, an imitation of the original, which was removed during the Second World War. Ali Pasha’s body was buried without its head, which was sent as a trophy to the Sultan following his defeat and execution in 1822.
As the Sultan’s forces closed in on him, following a long siege, Ali Pasha, tricked by offers of a pardon, sought refuge in the monastery of Agios Panteleimon on Nissi island, together with his favourite wife, or mistress, a Greek Christian woman called Kyra Vassiliki. Trapped in the upper room, but defiant until the end, he was shot through cracks in the floor boards before being beheaded. The little monastery now houses a museum dedicated to Ali Pasha. The monastery had to be reconstructed after a tree fell on it some years ago. Nevertheless, a glass square in the modern floor of the upper room reveals what are claimed to be the holes in the original floor through which Ali Pasha was shot.
Visiting castles, old buildings and other sites associated with famous historical figures, one rarely gets a sense of how they were in their heyday. Great stone palaces of the Muslim world, even when they survive, such as the Alhambra in Granada, shorn of the carpets, divans, cushions, all the colour that gave them life, are impressive, but evoke nothing of what they were like, of the world that once existed within the now bare stone walls. Nowadays, there is nothing left of the opulent palace described by Byron, Hobhouse and Hughes. Their accounts, and others like them, are all we have left of the vanished world. And yet, in the little museum on Nissi, surrounded by artefacts and pictures from Ali Pasha’s own time, I felt I caught just a glimmer of the Ioannina of the past.
Seeing a picture of the citadel with Ali Pasha’s palace in all its glory recalled something of the wondrous sight that so impressed earlier visitors. Among the many pictures off Ali Pasha, most of them shrouded in a voluminous cloak, is one by a British visitor, Joseph Cartwright, who met him some years after Byron. Cartwright was paymaster of the British forces based in Corfu, then the capital of the British protectorate of the Ionian Isles. He was a member of the delegation negotiating the transfer of the town of Parga to Ali Pasha. His picture shows Ali Pasha as he really was, and as described by Byron, as immensely fat. In his hand is his favourite, long pipe. And there, in a case in the middle of the room, is the pipe itself; the pipe held and smoked by Ali Pasha. And in the next room, the dress allegedly worn by Kyra Vassiliki on the day Ali Pasha was killed. Vassilki herself had been taken as a prisoner to Istanbul, but was later released and allowed to return to Greece.
After spending a few days in Ioannina, Byron and Hobhouse set out on an eleven-day journey to Tepelena, there to meet Ali Pasha. The first night, as Hobhouse forged on ahead with some of their party, Byron was lost in an enormous storm, only arriving in the village of Zitsa in the middle of the night. The next day, Byron was enchanted by Zitsa, describing it as being ‘in the most beautiful situation (always excepting Cintra in Portugal) I ever beheld.’ They were entertained at the local monastery by the prior, who, according to Byron’s servant, Fletcher, tried to teach him Greek and kissed him. The Dutch author Tessa de Loo, who made a journey from Ioannina to Tepelena in the 1990s, which she described in her book In Byron’s Footsteps, was disappointed with Zitsa, which she found to have been thoroughly modernised. With luck, she was able to enter the monastery, now abandoned by the monks and only used on special occasions.
I decided rather to head for the Zagori region, slightly to the east of Zitsa, renowned for its spectacular scenery and picturesque villages, carefully conserved according to regulations put in place by the authorities. The only bus to Monodendri, at one end of the Vikos Gorge, left Ioannina well before dawn. I arrived just as the first dull light began to illuminate the stone buildings of the village. My first day in Zagori was washed out by a violent storm that must have been something like the one that overtook Byron. Thunder rumbled from one side of the sky to the other, and then back again throughout the day, and the rain came down in sheets. I ventured out during a brief lull, wandering along the slippery cobbled paths of the old village. At one end of the village, where the tarmacked road arrives, where the buses stop, there are newer buildings, small hotels and shops, built for the burgeoning tourism industry. While they are built in the traditional stone style of the region, they do rather disfigure that part of the village. But walking into the heart of the old village, it is still very charming.
When I reached the village square, dominated by a huge old tree, the storm got going again, unleashing the biggest hail stones I had ever seen, like good sized stones. I sheltered in a little taverna, which was promptly plunged into near darkness as the electricity went out. Having already eaten, I asked for a glass of local grappa, which was warming and pleasant. Even better, the lady brought me a little plate of delicious spit-roasted pork, with some bread and onion, on the house. It seemed, for a moment, I was not just a customer, but, together with an elderly man in the corner, a guest who had sought refuge from the storm. This was the heart-warming kindness of strangers that I experienced many times during my travels in Greece.
Historically, Zagori was a multi-ethnic region, and many of the place names have Slavic or Vlach origin. The name Zagori itself might indicate a Slavic origin. Similar names – Zagora, Zagorje, meaning behind the mountain, are found in many South Slav regions. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was a prosperous region, as can be seen in the fine, large stone houses, most of which date from that period. A number of schools were founded in the 19th century, sometimes with help from Greek émigrés, which fostered the eventual triumph of Greek language and identity, which was finally resolved by the mass expulsions of Slavs and Albanians from northern Greece in the first half of the 20th century.
It is a lovely region. During two days of bright sunshine following my arrival, I visited the old village of Vitsa, not far from Monodendri. Both are set on hillsides, in the kind of beautiful situations that so beguiled Byron at Zitsa. Until the 1950s, when modern roads were built, the villages of Zagori were linked by stone paths, with 18th century stone bridges crossing the rivers and streams. It makes for wonderful trekking country, and the high-arched bridges that dot the valleys are a delight to see. Perhaps most splendid of all is the Vikos Gorge, nearly 1,000 metres deep in places, and all the more spectacular for its narrowness, sheer walls of rock rising up high from the riverbed at its bottom. The gorge is in virgin, pristine state, with no buildings, and just a path along which trekkers can walk. In summer, it is a popular destination. In October, I saw almost nobody as I walked.
Returning each day in mid-afternoon to the same little taverna in Monodendri where I had sheltered the first day, I sat under the huge plane tree and ate delicious simple food, washed down with Zitsa wine, the wine which Byron and his party must have drunk at the monastery there. Close to Monodendri, sitting perilously on the edge of the precipice of the Vikos Gorge, is the little 15th century Ayia Paraskevi monastery, much renovated, with bearded monks pottering about. On the day I visited, there were parties of Greek pilgrims, come to pray, light candles and bow before its icons.
I made the journey from Ioannina to Tepelena by bus in half a day, getting out at the border crossing at Kakavia, walking across, and catching a minibus on the Albanian side. When Byron and Hobhouse made the journey, taking a route a little to the east of today’s road, there was no border. This was all the territory of Ali Pasha. Ali Pasha was born in a village near Tepelena, and it was here that he had started his career of brigandage and war-making. Byron wrote of the arrival at Tepelena in the poem he wrote during his travels, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
Childe Harold saw, like meteors in the sky,The glittering minarets of Tepalen,
Whose walls o’er loom the stream; and drawing nigh,
He heard the busy hum of warrior men
Swelling the breeze that sighed along the lengthening glen.
He passed the sacred harem’s silent tower,
And underneath the wide o’erarching gate
Surveyed the dwelling of this chief of power
He was much impressed by the sight of the throngs gathered outside the palace, ‘a new & delightful spectacle to a stranger…’ In a letter to his mother he described ‘the Albanians in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold worked cloak, crimson velvet gold jacket & waistcoat, silver mounted pistols and daggers)…’ Hobhouse wrote of a first night in the castle disturbed by ‘the perpetual carousal which seemed to be kept up in the gallery, and by the drum, and the voice of the muezzin…’
The minibus dropped me in the square at the entrance to Tepelena, in front of the statue of the town’s most celebrated son, a reclining Ali Pasha, his beard flowing, pistols tucked into his belt. There is no palace now, but the fortress still stands. Inside its walls are modern houses, higgledy-piggledy along scrappy litter-strewn streets, some of them derelict. Tepelena is a modern town now, most of its buildings the poorly constructed blocks of the Hoxha period. I stayed at the communist-era Hotel Tourism. Every town in Albania had one like it. It wasn’t too bad, simple but adequate. The window frame in the bathroom did not fit into the hole in the wall, leaving a gap of about half an inch on one side, not uncommon in Hoxha-period construction. Thankfully the October nights were still warm. I slept well, no muezzins to disturb me now.
Seen from the river, the long fortress wall stretches along the ridge above. It is a fine sight on a sunny morning. The turquoise river winds through the valley, the fortress on one side, hills rising on the other. A rickety wooden bridge, slung between stone pillars, is the only link with the town for villagers on the other side. I stood at one end, half of the planks rotted away or missing, as many gaps as solid boards, and decided I did not need to cross. Halfway along the castle wall above the river is an entrance. Was this where Byron and Hobhouse arrived? It is piled high with earth, rubble and rubbish now.
There is a plaque marking Byron’s visit on the town-side wall of the fortress, with the famous picture of the poet in one of the Albanian costumes he bought in Tepelena, and some verses roughly translated from Childe Harold. But little has been done to show off Tepelena to its best advantage. However it looked when Byron visited, nothing has been preserved except for the stark fortress walls. Perhaps it was never as beautiful as Gjirokaster to the south and Berat to the north, both now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Few tourists stop here, despite the name of the hotel. But the site is magnificent, the river lovely, the castle impressive. Tepelena could be something more.
Byron wrote to his mother that he had spent £50 on Albanian costumes. In his portrait, painted back in England, he looks less like an Albanian warrior than an English lord in fancy dress. When, the day after his arrival in Tepelena, they were received by Ali Pasha, Byron was dressed in uniform with a sabre. The meeting took place in a room paved with marble, with a fountain in the middle. Ali Pasha paid them the unusual compliment of greeting them standing. He was highly attentive, telling Byron to regard him as a father while in Ottoman lands. Perhaps a little disconcertingly, he told Byron he could tell he was well-born by his “small ears, curling hair and little white hands”. He asked Byron to visit him often, especially at night, when he was more at leisure. During their stay in Tepelena, Ali Pasha sent gifts of almonds, sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats.
Byron admired the Albanians, seeing in them primitive virtues, bravery and honesty. They appealed to the romantic poet. In Childe Harold he wrote of them:
Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyesOn thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
[…]
Fierce are Albania’s children, yet they lack
Not virtues, were those virtues more mature.
Where is the foe that ever saw their back?
Who can so well the toil of war endure?
Their native fastnesses not more secure
Than they in doubtful time of troublous need:
Their wrath how deadly! but their friendship sure,
When Gratitude or Valour bids them bleed,
Byron kept a couple of Albanians as his guards throughout his travels in Greece. His lasting affection for them probably explains his indulgence of the unruly Suliotes he took under his wing when he joined the Greek independence struggle more than a decade later.
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