Preveza, at the mouth of the Amvrakikos Gulf, in southern Epirus, is a pleasant little town. In a maze of narrow streets between the Venetian clock tower, built at the end of the 18th century, and the seafront are lots of little restaurants selling simple, fresh seafood, packed with locals and a handful of foreign visitors during my weekend stay. It is a sleepy, peaceful place in autumn, but it is expanding fast, new villas springing up along the coast, international flights now arriving at the airport. But the proliferation of crumbling fortresses, overgrown with greenery, attest to a time when Preveza was strategically important and bitterly fought over. Now that importance has gone. Inside the walls of the Agios Andreas and Agios Georgios fortresses, which flank the town, stand derelict military barracks, empty guard huts at the entrances, evidence of more recent, but now ended military use.
Preveza changed hands many times during the Middle Ages, and, after a long spell of Ottoman rule, was held by Venice from 1717 until the Venetian Republic was snuffed out by Napoleon in 1797. The small French garrison stationed in the town, together with local Preveza guards and a band of Suliote warriors, were no match for the army with which Ali Pasha marched on the town the following year. The massacre of the defenders and the local Christian population that accompanied Ali Pasha’s capture of the town was one of the most notorious episodes in his cruel reign. He then called on those who had escaped to the mountains to return to the town, promising they would not be in any danger. When they returned, many of them were immediately put to the sword. Surviving prisoners were marched up to Ioannina, many of them perishing on the journey. Those who made it were paraded through the streets of Ali Pasha’s capital carrying the severed heads of their dead comrades, to the taunts of the town’s Muslim inhabitants. A handful of the French prisoners were afterwards sent to Istanbul.
Lord Byron briefly stopped in Preveza a few years later, when he first arrived in Greece, dining with the British consul in the town. It did not make a favourable impression. Byron’s companion, John Cam Hobhouse, was appalled by the hole-in-the-floor privy, later admitting that ‘had the commander of the brig been very pressing, I believe we should have consented to go back to Patras.’ The sorry state of Preveza in the years following Ali Pasha’s conquest was attested by another British traveller, the Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes, who visited a few years after Byron and Hobhouse. He wrote of a deplorable change in the town, whose population had been reduced from 16,000 to 3,000, a monument to the worst afflictions of arbitrary power. The remaining inhabitants stalked like spectres through its vacant and deserted streets, many of the buildings and all the churches raised to the ground. Yet despite all that, Hughes wrote, Preveza was ‘a very favourite residence of the pasha, his great naval depot, fortified by the strongest works and adorned by the finest palace in his dominions.’ But Ali Pasha cannot have cared much for Preveza. He removed the clock mechanism and bell from the clock tower, and took them back to Ioannina.
Ali Pasha beefed up the defences of the town. He substantially rebuilt the Venetian fortress of Agios Andreas, and built the Agios Georgios fort on the other side of the town. He built the Pantokrator fortress, named after the church on the site, a little to the north of the town, and a small fortress on the other side of the gulf, next to where the airport now stands. This is a region of many castles, up and down the coast. The fortresses around Preveza are all decaying, neglected. Modern buildings and streets have breached the walls of Agios Georgios. Sitting a little distance from the town, and only recently surrounded by new suburbs, the Pantokrator fortress has been better preserved. Jutting out into the sea, from a distance it looks rather fine. But inside, it is much decayed. Some more modern constructions inside the fort have also been abandoned, and vandals and graffitists have done much damage. There appears to be little interest in conserving the town’s past.
With the fall of Ali Pasha in 1822, the town reverted to direct Ottoman rule, which continued until the First Balkan war of 1912. Later in the 19th century, as the emergent Balkan states vied for the territory of the decaying Ottoman Empire, Albanians struggled to assert their interests. Preveza had a significant Albanian population in the 19th century. In 1878, as the Congress of Berlin considered a further carve up of Ottoman territory, and Greece pressed its claim to Epirus, Albanians began to organise their resistance. In January 1879, the Albanian Committee of Preveza, a branch of the League of Prizren, organised the Assembly of Preveza, a meeting of local Albanian delegates and supporters from elsewhere in the Albanian-inhabited Ottoman lands. This Assembly determined to oppose the cessation of Epirus from the Ottoman Empire to Greece. The following month, Albanian representatives from around the Ottoman Empire signed a petition in Preveza, threatening to take up arms to prevent the town being transferred to Greece.
On this occasion, the Albanians prevailed. But it was only a temporary reprieve. In the First Balkan War, in 1912, Preveza was taken for Greece. There is no visible sign of the former Albanian presence now. The statues and monuments are for Greek heroes, the victors. By the best preserved section of the wall of the fortress of Agios Andreas is a memorial to the fallen defenders of the homeland from 1912-1940, the Greek homeland. Their victory meant this would not be a homeland for Albanians. The Albanian story in Preveza has been rubbed out. Prominently placed on the seafront is a statue of Odysseus Androutsos, one of the several rival leaders of the Greek revolt against the Turks, whose mother was from Preveza. Shortly before his death in Missilonghi, just down the coast from Preveza, in April 1824, Byron had accepted an invitation from Androutsos to attend a congress in Salona, in eastern Greece, to try to unite the different Greek factions. He hoped his presence might help bring accord. He never made it, dying before he could set out.
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