Travels: Patras to Ioaninna

Over the weekend, my colleagues Scott Moore, Richard Rothaus, and I took a bit of a break from the Corinthia. We went west to Patras and then turned north to visit Ioannina and sites along the way as we returned.

As a happy coincidence I discovered a short book that starts in Arta before proceeding to Ioannina and Patras: The Personal Narrative of the Sufferings of J. Stephanini (1829). The book is the first person narrative from a Greek from a wealthy family who was enslaved when the Ottomans retook Patras during the opening phases of the Greek War of Independence. The book apparently achieved some minor celebrity status in the US among abolitionists and supporters of Greek independence. It foregrounded Ottoman cruelty and demonstrated the brutality of slavery as an institution by illustrating how an Ottoman master could dehumanize “even” a white, Christian, European Greek. 

The first chapters of the book depict Staphanini’s idyllic childhood in the cities of Arta and Ioannina and his family’s move to Patras to avoid the rapaciousness of Ali Pasha who controlled most of Epirus at the time. In Patras, his fortunes changed for the worse as he was captured by Ottoman forces at the fall of the city in the opening stages of the Greek War of Independence. Despite the harrowing turn in Stephanini’s narrative (which I am considering assigning in my Greek History class in the spring), his description of Ioannina provided a pleasant mental image for my postprandial stroll by Ioannina’s lake.

(This isn’t to trivialize the vivid brutality of Stephanini’s larger work which deserves its own post. The significance of the story of an enslaved Greek both to the American abolitionist movement and to efforts to raise support for the new Greek nation offers a window into the place of Greece in the American imagination and activism in the 19th century.) 

On the way to Ioannina, we stopped for lunch at Amphilochia, a town on the Ambracian Gulf. While there, we paid tribute to Andreas Stratos who published a six-volume political history of the 7th century after a long and distinguished career as a politician. 

We then stopped for a few minutes in Arta where we just missed being able to visit the Panayia Paregoretissa, but I was able to snap a few exterior photos as a consolation prize (see what I did there?).

After an evening in Ioannina, we stopped at Cassope to admire the Hellenistic site there and the dramatic, if hazy, views of the Ambracian Gulf and the monument to the Women of Zalongo. 

Finally, we spent a few hours admiring the walls of Nikopolis and its churches and sites. 

Like any good vacation, we were more tired by the end of the trip than we were at the start, but it was great to spend some time with great colleagues, good books, and sites that inform our research.