Ioannina Travel Guide (Ioannina, Greece)

Moving west from Métsovo, you drop first into the Árakhthos river valley, then climb again over a shoulder of Mount Mitsikéli before the final descent to the north margin of the great, reed-fringed lake of Pamvótidha (Pamvótis). On its south shore, the old town of IOÁNNINA (often Yiánnena) covers a rocky promontory jutting out into the water, its fortifications punctuated by bastions and minarets. From this base, Ali Pasha carved out - at 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, most 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 one of Greece's fastest-growing provincial capitals, with the city and suburbs' population recently reaching about 130,000. Much of this has been sucked inward from moribund villages in the remoter reaches of the province, but it also includes 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 evoke the Ottoman era, two worthwhile museums , and the fortifications of Ali Pasha's citadel, the Kástro , the latter surviving more or less intact. Ioánnina is also the jump-off point for visits to the caves of Pérama , some of Greece's largest, on the western shore of the lake, and the longer excursion to the mysterious and remote Oracle of Zeus at Dodona , as well as to Epirus's most rewarding corner, Zagóri .