This is a week when we should be remembering and mourning the genocide committed by the Turks on the Armenians, which began a hundred years ago today (and took the lives of many Anatolian Greeks as well.). But I am reprinting here an essay I first posted in August of 2009, because some friends are visiting Greece soon and asked me about the tragic history of Ioannina, the provincial capitol of Epiros, Greece, where we stay every summer before heading up the mountains to Nick's native village of Lia on the Albanian border.
Ali Pasha on the Lake of Ioannina
On
our first evening back in Greece, last week, a stroll down the main
street of Ioannina took us past reminders of the cataclysms that have
racked this area for the past 200 years. The entire population of the
city seemed to be outside, enjoying the perfect weather. Ioannina (also
spelled Yannina) is the provincial capital of Epiros and the
stepping-off place for my husband Nick’s village—about an hour’s drive
farther north on a mountain just below the Albanian border.
I
often remind myself, when I’m in Greece, that any Greek my age—old
enough to remember World War II—is a survivor of the Italian and Nazi
occupations, the terrible starvation that followed, and the bloody Civil
War that rent the country after that. The Civil War still splits the
populace along political lines when you bring up stories like that of my
mother-in-law Eleni Gatzoyiannis, who was imprisoned, tortured and
killed in 1948 for engineering her children’s’ escape from their
occupied village. She began planning the escape when the Communist
guerrillas started collecting children to send to re-education camps
behind the Iron Curtain. (This was called the pedomasoma, and while
many claim it never happened—like Holocaust deniers— in fact 28,000
children were taken from their parents and reared in communist
countries.)
In Ioannina, as elsewhere, Greeks traditionally take
an evening stroll—the peripato-- families walking together, pushing baby
strollers, the youth checking each other’s fashion statements.
Everyone eventually sits at an outdoor cafe to enjoy an iced coffee or a
glass of wine or ouzo and watch the passing parade. (Dinner doesn’t
start until ten p.m.). The peripato is especially popular in towns on
the sea or on a lakeside harbor like Ioannina.
Outdoor restaurants, hammered metalwork, memorial to the Jews taken from Ioannina, the gate to the walled Turkish city
Tourists have
not yet discovered this city, which is little changed from the days when
Lord Byron visited the notorious tyrant Ali Pasha in the walled Turkish
Kastro which still stands—its walls intact, its minarets and palaces
now turned into museums.
In Ioannina we stayed in the new Grand
Serai hotel, ornately decorated with marble, crystal chandeliers and
copies of paintings showing Lord Byron and Ali Pasha—the Albanian vizier
who tried to seize control of the area from the Turkish Sultan in
Constantinople.
Ali Pasha had 300 women in his harem and 300 boys
in his seraglio, so they say in Ioannina. Most of them were kidnapped
from the neighboring Greek villages—pretty girls for the harem,
promising boys to be trained as soldiers in the Janissary corps.
Turkish rule ended in Northern Greece in 1913, but even after that,
village women like Nick’s mother Eleni, warned their daughters to cover
their faces with their kerchiefs to avoid being kidnapped for their
beauty. Nick’s father, who was born in 1891, wasn’t sure of his exact
birth date because his mother, like everyone else, lied about the age of
the boys, making them younger so they wouldn’t be taken as Turkish
soldiers.
Melodramatic painting of the killing of Kyria Frosini, one of Ali Pasha's most famous victims
Ali Pasha had a habit of drowning individuals who
displeased him by sealing them in sacks weighted with stones and
dropping them into the bottomless Lake Pamvotis below the walls of the
Turkish Kastro. They say that in the morning mists over the lake you
can see the ghosts of the women who died there, including Kyria
Efrosini, the lover of one of Ali Pasha’s sons, who tried to sell her
expensive ring in the marketplace. A famous painting portrays her and
her maids, who were drowned with her, being rowed to their death by
grinning evil Turks.
Taxi-boats to the island, entrance to the walled city
Today the lakefront is the scene of
excellent restaurants and nightclubs which are filled to overflowing
with the youth of the city, partying late into the night. Even at
midnight, families are out, dining al fresco as children enjoy a Lunar
Park of carnival rides and outdoor shows of traditional Greek shadow
puppets. There are the gypsies, selling everything from mixed nuts to
cheap Chinese electronics, and the little ferryboats, chugging to and
from the island in the middle of the lake. Day or night the lakeside is
a happening scene,
Ali Pasha was assassinated in 1822 in his
summer home on the large island in the middle of the lake (which has
many tavernas featuring freshwater fish like trout, plus eels and frogs
legs.)
Ali Pasha nd his wife Kyra Vassiliki, who facilitated his murder
Ali’s wife was Kyria Vassiliki, who was kidnapped (if I
remember correctly) from her village of Plessio at the age of 15. The
old man trusted the lovely Vassiliki, but she learned of his plan to
torch Greek villages and she abetted assassins sent by the Sultan in
Constantinople—giving a signal which allowed the killers entrance to Ali
Pasha’s island home, where they shot him from the floor below.
The
Turks cut off Ali Pasha’s head and carted it to the Sultan in
Constantinople, along with Vassilki as a witness—to prove that the
tyrant was dead. His headless body was buried under an elaborate
wrought- iron cage in Ioannina, still standing near the mosque that is
now a museum.
In gratitude for saving her fellow Greeks, Kyria
Vassiliki was returned to her village and became the first Greek woman
to receive social security.
As we walked down the main
street--Averoff— toward the lake front, we passed the entrance to the
Turkish Kastro, and a shrine to two local Greek warriors who were hanged
by the Turks from a nearby plane tree. They are now saints.
Then
we passed a monument to the Jews of Ioannina, who lived mostly within
the Kastro—near the ancient synagogue which still survives (although
there are rarely enough men to make a minion.) A sign says in both
Greek and English, “In memory of our 1,850 Jewish cohabitants who were
arrested on March 25th, 1944, and executed in the Nazi concentration
camps”. That is another story in Ioannina’s bloody history and one that
is still being written about.
As we approached the lake, we
passed a warren of shops featuring wares of hammered copper and brass
as well as silver filigree: traditional handicrafts of Ioannina. Some
of the objects are made from mortar shells left from the war.
Then
we reached the lakeside, where the music was blaring and the populace
was eating and drinking and admiring the view. Aside from some lakeside
statues of veiled women, representing the victims of Ali Pasha, there
was no sign of the city’s tragic history, only merriment and music on a
balmy summer night.