My friend, Mr. Arthur Hill, the British Vice Consul at PirÆus, being about to make a business trip through Epiros in the spring of 1891, invited me to join him. Without this invitation I should have travelled Greece very unsymmetrically, leaving out all the country west of the great Pindos range. It is fair to call this Greece, although, in defiance of the arrangements of the treaty of Berlin, most of it remains politically Turkish.

At Patras we took a little Greek coasting steamer late at night, and, with only one incident worth mentioning, arrived a little after noon the next day at Prevesa on Turkish territory. The one incident was a stop of an hour in the wonderfully retired harbor on the east coast of Ithaca. If Homer had this in mind in describing the harbor of Phorkys he might well say that the ships needed no cable there. Even half an hour on shore for a short Homeric reverie was something to be thankful for. On our boat was a man who looked for all the world like the weather-beaten Ulysses returning from his twenty-years’ absence. To my disgust he did not get off at Ithaca to hunt up Penelope, but went on to Leukas.

Arrived in Prevesa, I was made aware that we were off the beaten track by being informed that a letter which I had hastily written to send back to Athens would not even start for six days. This impression was deepened by the information that the British Consul at Prevesa had, during the seventeen years of his sojourn there, never thought of going to Joannina, two days into the interior. This was our goal. The excitement of visiting a country absolutely devoid of tourists is so rare that one may be pardoned for giving way to it.

Of course one cannot travel here without an escort. Two mounted men accompanied us everywhere in Turkey, and when we again came over the Greek frontier we were met by a sergeant and six privates.

Our first day was nearly all spent in skirting the gulf and plain of Ambrakia. One need not be impatient to get away from that beautiful region. The first object which drew our attention was the ruins of Nikopolis, about an hour out from Prevesa. The city was founded by Augustus as a magnificent trophy of his victory at Actium, at the foot of the hill on which he had pitched his tent before the battle. On sailing into Prevesa the day before, we had passed over the very waters once enlivened by that combat, and over which Antony, forgetting for once to be a soldier, followed the wanton queen in flight and left the world to Augustus.

The ruins of Nikopolis, spread out over several square miles, look imposing in the distance; but, like most Roman ruins near at hand, vulgar in comparison with Greek. The theatre is massive, and the aqueduct inspires respect for the practical sense of the conquerors of the world. The thought that St. Paul spent a winter here gives a peculiar interest to the ruins.

By pressing your way up through a part of the square miles of breast-high thistles about the theatre, you may reach the top of the hill from which Augustus looked down and saw his enemy apparently strong. The whole world for which he was about to grapple affords few scenes of greater beauty than that which lay before his eye.

The road over which our carriage proceeded was a testimonial that the Turks have been misrepresented by the traveller who said:

“It is a favorite idea with all barbarous princes that the badness of the roads adds considerably to the natural strength of their dominions. The Turks and Persians are undoubtedly of this opinion; the public highways are, therefore, neglected, and particularly so toward the frontiers.”

The road was being made into a good one, but as long stretches of it were covered with piles of dirt, and on a level three or four feet above the older parts, getting on was attended with difficulty. But the Turks could not be considered devoid of energy when they put so much work upon the road which everybody was then prophesying would in a few years pass into the hands of the Greeks. It may be that the “sick man” thought he might yet use that road for military operations which would trouble his southern neighbors. At any rate he did so.

Along the foot of the mountains which bound the plain of Ambrakia to the north, out from under the well-built road, copious fountains of clear, cold water gush, contributing to the river Luro, the ancient Charadros, which here overflows its banks far and wide; and a most luxuriant tangle of trees and vines, standing often in several inches of water, impenetrable as an Indian jungle, astonishes one accustomed to judge the vegetation of Greece by its eastern parts.

Our second day’s journey was up the gorge of the Luro to its sources, and then over a ridge into the plain of Joannina. For six hours we had one continuous vale of Tempe. One does not hear enough of this region. Who, for instance, ever hears of Rogus, a ruin which we passed toward evening on the first day? Yet here is an acropolis which one sees from a great distance—such an imposing affair that I supposed for a long time that it must be Ambrakia. There are remains of fine old Hellenic walls, on which stood Byzantine walls now badly crumbled. Leake supposes Rogus to be the ancient Charadra.

Along with us went a large family of Jews, seeking among the Turks a safer residence than the Ionian Islands, where just then the Jew was made very uncomfortable. As we halted at noon of the first day by a large oak-tree, on the shore of a brook, it was interesting to see groups, Christian, Jew, and Turk, taking their meals at quite an interval from one another, but all under the shade of the same tree. As we came into Joannina, the Jews were subjected to a searching examination, but we were not examined at all. We heard afterward that the father of this family was suspected of bringing a lot of letters, thus defrauding the Turkish Government of its postage fee.

But I have delayed so long over preliminaries that I can hardly be just to Joannina itself. In fact, to be just to Joannina one should write a book, and not an article. As one approaches the great plain and lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains, one feels that here, as now, must always have been the principal settlement of the whole region. The name Joannina (pronounced Yanina) appears in Byzantine annals as early as the ninth century, when mention is made of a bishop of Joannina about three hundred and fifty years after the last mention of a bishop of Dodona. Though not standing on the same site, it is the successor of Dodona. But its history is essentially Turkish. Perhaps its greatest distinction is that it was the capital of Ali Pasha, who, in the first twenty years of the present century, had established, by an energetic unscrupulousness which reminds one of Demosthenes’s picture of Philip of Macedon, a sovereignty practically independent of the Sultan, almost as large as the Sultan’s other European possessions. Ali had a sort of thirst for blood, which appears not to have belonged to Philip. The Greeks, however, seem to have forgiven him the slaughter of their fathers and mothers in deference to his genius, and to take a local pride in the monster. Most of the stories told about him are records of some murder or other. Most of the compliments which his satellites used to pay him turned on the idea that he was a good butcher. A place in the lake is still pointed out as the scene of the drowning of a dozen or so Greek women whose morals, forsooth, were not up to the high standard which Ali said he was going to set up. Some of them belonged to the best families in Joannina, and could not believe that Ali meant more than blackmail until the waters were closing over them, when they shrieked and grasped at the boat so wildly that the executioners had to become inhuman in order to carry out the commands of their lord.

But this Albanian Mussulman reckoned ill when he threw down the gauntlet to the Sultan. Retiring to an island in the lake, when he could no longer defend his capital, he was first stabbed treacherously in a parley in which he thought he was going to make terms with his master, and finally killed by shots fired through the floor from the room under that in which he had taken refuge. His head and those of his sons, who had not well supported their father in the struggle, were fastened up over the door of the Seraglio in Constantinople.

One afternoon, after conversing awhile with the successor of Ali, the present Vali or Governor-General of Epirus, if it can be called conversing to take a cup of coffee with a man, and see him smoke a cigarette, giving you meanwhile a few of his thoughts through an interpreter, we went over to the island, and saw the room in a monastery where Ali was slain. The floor was well perforated with bullet-holes.

Ali had unwittingly paved the way for Greek independence. He had shown that the power of the Sultan might be resisted for a while at least. Some of the leaders of the Greeks, who made his camp their school of war, felt that the evoking of a grand national sentiment would make them able to resist to the end. When Ali fell in 1822, Greece was already in arms.

Joannina, in the days of Ali, had, if we may believe reports, a population of 50,000. It has now not more than half that number. The Greeks are about three-quarters of the whole population, the other quarter being divided between Turks and Jews, with considerable preponderance in favor of the former, who still hold all the offices, and show by their bearing that they are the ruling class. One evening we visited the castle, which occupies a peninsula jutting out into the lake, made an island by a moat across the neck. It was positively scandalous the way those soldiers went in rags. Even the noncommissioned officers, with their torn chevrons, seemed in harmony with the walls and barracks, now tumbling to decay. But these awkward, ragged fellows seemed to have signs of strength about them, and might give a good report of themselves in battle. We lingered long over one big gun, which bore marks of service at Shipka Pass. We were reminded then that it would not do to leave out the Turk entirely in the settlement of the Eastern question.

To the west of Joannina the population is largely Albanian. This class of Albanians makes you feel that there may be some truth in the words of an English traveller, who, in classifying the Albanians, speaks of one class as “Albanians who never change their clothes.” The chronology of some of these garments of more than a hundred heterogeneous pieces would be an interesting study. Rags are generally picturesque, and these Albanians contribute somewhat to the picturesqueness of Joannina’s streets. They wear for the most part a white fez, darkened by age and dirt, which distinguishes them from the people of the city, who wear, almost to a man, the red fez. On one or two occasions when Mr. Hill started to take a photograph in the streets, before he could set up his camera, a perfect sea of red heads was formed in front of it, and the very zeal to be photographed frustrated the attempt. It was almost like evoking a mob.

But in Joannina, of all places in the world, one must not forget the past, the great Hellenic past. This region was once called Hellopia and the inhabitants Selloi, a variation for Helloi, and from here the name appears to have been transmitted to the whole of Hellas. It is quite a testimonial to the persistency of the old Hellenic spirit that travellers all notice how pure is the Greek spoken in Joannina.

Three hours’ ride across a range of hills to the south lies Dodona, at the foot of Mount Tomarus, which at the time of our visit (in May) was heavily capped with snow. This oldest oracle and sanctuary of Greece, famous before Delphi was born, has a situation only a little less imposing than Delphi. Until about twenty-five years ago one was still in doubt in just what part of this region to look for the old famous sanctuary. But at that time Carapanos, a wealthy Greek, settled that question with the spade.

Procuring from the library, by the kindness of the professor of French in the Lyceum, the two beautiful volumes in which Carapanos has given the results of his work, I took them with me to the spot where he found Dodona, and followed in his footsteps. This library, by the way, contains a good many valuable books, new and old, but they are huddled together in very close quarters, as the librarian sadly admitted, employing the English phrase “pell-mell.” But worse than the disorder was the dampness. Carapanos’s book of plates was mildewed and fallen apart. Rich Greeks probably think their benefactions more safely bestowed in Athens. Otherwise somebody would have given a new library building to Joannina.

The walls that Carapanos discovered all have a singularly late appearance, and there is a striking lack of pottery in the ground; but the inscriptions and dedicatory offerings leave no doubt that this is Dodona. The temples and the finely built theatre, one of the largest in Greece, doubtless supplied the place of older and ruder buildings of the time when all Hellas came to hear the voice of Father Zeus in the rustling oak-leaves.

At the southeastern end of the lake of Joannina is a hill called Kastritza, crowned by fortifications indicating the existence of just such a city as one would look for to match this great plain and lake. Here are walls about three miles in circuit, and, in a considerable part of their extent, twenty feet high and twelve feet thick, of the finest polygonal work. And yet, so little is known of the history of Epirus, that even the name of this city cannot be ascertained with certainty. Leake thought it was Dodona itself, placing the sanctuary, however, at a little distance, on the spot now occupied by Joannina. Kastritza might still be regarded as a possible candidate for Dodona, inasmuch as sanctuaries in Greece were often at quite a remove from the nearest town, as in the case of Epidauros and Oropos. But the fact that very little is known of any city called Dodona, as well as the fact on the other side that the sanctuary excavated by Carapanos has a small acropolis connected with it, makes it extremely improbable that this great city, Kastritza, was Dodona.

The picturesqueness of the city of Joannina is matched by its grand setting. Its lake is over a thousand feet above the sea, and streams from the amphitheatre of the snow-covered mountains keep flowing into it without finding any visible outlet. The color upon the mountains and the lake at sunrise and sunset is often wonderful. Mount Mitzikeli, which rises abruptly from the lake on its side opposite the city, is a breeder of thunder-storms. (It must be remembered that this was the abode of Jupiter Tonans in antiquity.) Sometimes at mid-day, when the sun is shining to the east and west of Joannina, a storm-cloud will come down over this mountain from the higher ones of the Pindus range back of it and make straight for the city. What a place for a painter! Leake tells of the difficulty he had in persuading the Italian painter, Lusieri, to stay beyond a day or two here because he thought he detected symptoms of malaria; but, adds Leake:

“The picturesque beauties of the place had such a powerful attraction for him that he was induced to hazard a longer visit, until his fears having been calmed by my own experience, and that of the Joanninites in general, he prolonged his stay for six weeks. The longer he remained the more he was impressed with the feeling that in the great sources of his art, the sublime and beautiful, and in their exquisite mixture and contrast, Joannina exceeds every place he had seen in Italy or Greece.”

It is a pity that the pictures which Lusieri painted here were lost at sea.

The exit from this place, where tourists are never seen and where newspapers are strictly prohibited, into the Greek world of talk and bustle was as interesting as the approach to it. Our road lay over the great pass of the Pindos into Thessaly, the pass over which Julius CÆsar led his army, when he was about to grapple with Pompey. For the first day’s ride the Arachthos was our road. We crossed it more than twenty times, when it was a credit to our horses not to be carried down the stream. Of course, keeping one’s feet entirely out of the water was impossible. At last we came to the end of that day’s journey, where the stream had dwindled to a harmless looking brook at the Wallachian town of Metzovo. These Wallachians, especially the women, look entirely different from the people round about. They talk a sort of Latin and are supposed to be a remnant of the old Roman colony of Dacia. The quaint old town, where this curious old people is wedged in among other peoples, is within two hours of the backbone of Pindos, over which we passed the next morning. Within an area of a few square miles here nearly all the rivers of Greece that flow all the year round have their head waters.

It was with something of a feeling of exaltation that we left our Turkish guards behind at the ridge of Pindos and soon found ourselves tracing the ever-widening streamlet, which was soon to become the broad Peneios, down into the land of the Greeks, not only of Greek gods and heroes of the past, but of the Greek men of to-day, who have at last here inherited what their fathers possessed.