Tourist information - Ioannina
Ioannina features a rocky promontory jutting out into the water, its fortifications interspersed with bastions and minarets. With this base, Ali Pasha carved out - with the expense of the sultan's authority - a fiefdom that encompassed much of western Greece and present-day Albania: an act of contemptuous rebellion that portended wider defiance in the Greeks' own war of independence.
Disappointingly, almost all of the city is modern and undistinguished, a testimony not so much to Ali (although he did raze much of it to the ground while under siege in 1820), as to developers in the 1960s - and the fact that Ioánnina is among one of Greece's fastest-growing provincial capitals, with the city and suburbs' population recently reaching about 130,000. Much of this has been taken inward from moribund villages in the remoter reaches of the province, it also incorporates some 25,000 students at the major university here, who keep things lively, plus military personnel and their dependants - Ioánnina has served as a strategic garrison town since its incorporation into Greece.
However, there are still a pair of stone-built mosques (and a synagogue) to stimulate the Ottoman era, two valuable museums , and also the fortifications of Ali Pasha's citadel, the Kástro , the latter surviving more or less intact. Ioánnina is likewise the jump-off point for visits to the caves of Pérama , a few of Greece's largest, on the western shore of the lake, and also the longer excursion to the mysterious and remote Oracle of Zeus at Dodona , as well as to Epirus's most rewarding corner, Zagóri.
The Kástro is really an obvious point to begin your explorations. In its heyday the walls dropped suddenly to the lake, and were moated around the landward (southwest) side. The moat is actually filled in, and a quay-esplanade now extends below the lakeside ramparts, however, there is still the feel of a citadel; inside nestles a quiet residential zone with narrow alleys along with its own shops.
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