GREECE EPIRUS IOANNINA IOANNINA

Ioannina, capital and largest city of Epirus, was founded by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD on the western shore of lake Pamvotis. There are some cozy corners, but otherwise it is a quite busy town with a growing population of 120,000.

Ioannina flourished following the Fourth Crusade, when many wealthy Byzantine families fled there in the early 13th century following the sack of Constantinople. It was the capital of the Despotate of Epirus from 1358 to 1416, before surrendering to the Ottomans in 1430. Between 1430 and 1868 the city was the administrative center of the Pashalik of Yanina. In the period between the 16th and 19th centuries, the city was a major center of the modern "Greek Enlightenment". By the 17th century Ioannina was a thriving city with respect to population and commercial activity, and many important schools were established.

In 1789 the city became the center of the territory ruled by the Ottoman-Albanian lord Ali Pasha. Although during this time Ali Pasha committed a number of atrocities against the Greek population of Ioannina, culminating in the sewing up of local women in sacks and drowning them in the nearby lake, this period coincides with the greatest economic and intellectual era of the city. The central government of the Ottoman Empire was alarmed by the efforts of Ali Pasha to break away from it, declared him guilty of treason, besieged Ioannina and Ali Pasha was assassinated.

After the Battle of Bizani during the First Balkan War, fought between Greek and Ottoman forces, Ioannina was incorporated into the Greek state in 1913. A significant Jewish community populated the site of the modern city perhaps as early as 70 AD (a later destroyed synagogue bore an inscription, which dated its foundation in the late 9th century AD). Nearly all of these Jews were deported by the Nazis to concentration camps in 1944, during the final months of German occupation.