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IOANNINA CITY CAR RENTAL |
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Ioannina City car rental - Travel Guide |
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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 is 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.
The town
The Kástro is an obvious point to begin your explorations. In its heyday the walls dropped abruptly to the lake, and were moated on their landward (southwest) side. The moat has been filled in, and a quay-esplanade now extends below the lakeside ramparts, but there is still the feel of a citadel; inside nestles a quiet residential zone with narrow alleys and its own shops.
Signs inside direct you to the Municipal (Popular Art) Museum (summer Mon-Fri 8am-8pm, Sat-Sun 9am-8pm; winter Mon-Fri 8am-3pm, Sat-Sun 9am-3pm; ?2), an elegantly arranged collection of Epirot costumes, guns and jewellery. More poignant is a section devoted to synagogue rugs and tapestries donated in the early 1990s by the dwindling Jewish community of about thirty; their hávra or synagogue at Ioustinianoú 16 can be visited on application to the community office at Iosíf Eliyía 18B (the unmarked, ground-floor storefront - only Greek or Hebrew spoken). Some 150m west of the clocktower over the kástro gate, a municipally erected, trilingual memorial honours the 1850 local Jews deported on March 25, 1944 to their deaths at Auschwitz.
The museum's so-called Muslim wing features a walnut and mother-of-pearl suite, complete with the pipe of Esat Pasha, last Ottoman governor here. The museum is housed in the well-preserved, floodlit Aslan Pasha Tzami , allowing a rare glimpse of the interior of a Greek mosque; it retains painted decoration in its dome and mihrab (niche indicating direction of Mecca), as well as the recesses in the vestibule for worshippers' shoes. The mosque dates from 1618, built on the site of an Orthodox cathedral pulled down in reprisal for a failed local revolt of 1611. Its instigator, Skylosofos (The Dog-Sage), was a charismatic religious hermit who lived in a dank cave directly underneath the cathedral and its replacement; the grotto is now signposted from the lake esplanade.
In the adjacent, arcaded medresse or Muslim seminary, tradition places Ali's attempted rape in 1801 of Kyra Phrosyne, the mistress of his eldest son. In return for refusing the 62-year-old tyrant's sexual advances, she was bound, weighted and thrown alive into Lake Pamvótidha, together with seventeen of her companions. The incident gave rise to several folk songs (and not a few kitsch postcards); her ghost is still said to hover over the water on moonlit nights. The medresse is currently home to the Fotis Rapakousis Museum (same hours as museum; free, but items labeled only in Greek), a huge collection of medieval weaponry and jewellery.
To the east of the Aslan Pasha Tzami lays the "Its Kale" or inner citadel of the fortress (daily 7am-10pm; free); the grounds are often used for concerts after-hours, and there's a pleasant, reasonably priced café near the entrance. The citadel was used for some years by the Greek military and most of its buildings - including Ali's palace where Byron was entertained - have unfortunately been adapted or restored in a way that they can no longer be recognized as eighteenth-century structures. One of two Ottoman graves in front of the old Fethiye Tzami (Victory Mosque), surmounted by an elegant wrought-iron cage, may be that of Ali Pasha, though neither is identified as such. The tyrant's former palace has been pressed into service as the Byzantine Museum (summer Mon 12.30-7pm, Tues-Sun 8am-7pm; winter Tues-Sun 8.30am-5pm; ?1.50), a remarkably thin and emphatically post-Byzantine collection which can be skipped if time is short of if you're heading towards Kastoriá. Its six rooms contain masonry from assorted collapsed Epirot basilicas, troves of coins, medieval pottery and a few post-Byzantine icons, mostly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, but far too many Cibachrome prints of frescoes in situ elsewhere. The only genuinely Byzantine painting is a fresco fragment of The Betrayal, from a damaged church in Voulgarélli. A few paces away, in the purported treasury of Ali Pasha's seraglio, is a marginally better auxiliary exhibit, labeled as the "Silverwork Hall" , devoted to Ioánnina's long-running silver industry, featuring both secular and ecclesiastical work from the nineteenth century, and an explanatory mock-up of a smith's work-bench.
Apart from the Kástro, the town's most enjoyable quarter is that of the old bazaar , a roughly semicircular area focused on the citadel's main gate. This retains a cluster of Ottoman-era buildings (including some imposing houses with ornate window grilles), as well as a scattering of copper- and tinsmiths, plus the silversmiths that were for centuries a mainstay of the town's economy.
Just off the central Platía Dhimokratías (recently renamed Andhréa Papandhréou), set beside a small park behind the National Bank, is the decently presented archeological museum (Tues-Sun 8.30am-3pm; ?1.50). It's certainly a must if you're planning a visit to the theatre and oracle of Dodona, for on display here - along with some exceptionally well-crafted bronze seals - is a fascinating collection of lead tablets inscribed with questions to the oracle. In the same room are numerous bronze statuettes, including two Hellenistic children - one throwing a ball and one holding a dove. In adjacent galleries, Roman artefacts include ornate relief-carved sarcophagi from Paramythiá and Igoumenítsa, while there are earlier funerary and votive bronze or ceramic items from Ambrakia (Árta), Aheron (the Necromanteion of Ephyra) and Vítsa.
The oldest item, part of a small exhibit on prehistoric Epirus, is a crudely hewn hand-axe, dated to 200,000 BC, the earliest such tool known in Greece. There is also a wealth of finds from a Molossian cemetery at Liatovoúni near Kónitsa, almost all of it from Corinth; the ancient Corinthians colonized both the entire Epirot coast and the tastes of the Molossian tribe, for the latter used the proceeds from trading excess livestock and crops to buy Corinthian luxury goods. Corinthian excess is most evident in the eye-catching "Treasures of Amvrakia" display, which includes oak-leaf wreaths, cupid-shaped earrings, and rings with inset gems, all executed in gold. |
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Call Center |
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OPENING HOURS |
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| MIAMI(EST) |
Mon - Fri: 06:00 - 18:00 |
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Sat - Sun: 06:00 - 12:00 |
| LONDON (GMT) |
Mon - Fri 08:00 - 23:00 |
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Sat - Sun: 08:00 - 16:00 |
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| 1. UK |
0800 0789054 |
| 2. USA |
1 866 735 1715 |
| 3. AUSTRALIA |
1 800 210813 |
| 4. FRANCE |
0805 100863 |
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