Missy Bear has arrived Preveza in the modern region of Epirus, which lies on the eastern coast of the Ionian Sea. If we had strayed a few degrees off course on our crossing, we would have ended in Corfu or even possibly Albania, which formed part of the ancient region of Epirus.
The area is generally rugged and mountainous, but here at the mouth of the Gulf of Actium the landscape is gentler and the sea is calm, reflecting the blue of the late autumn skies. After unseasonably cold and wet weather – caused by the same low-pressure system that locked us in Sicily for over a week – the locals are enjoying a late summer respite, and have put their warm clothes away, albeit temporarily.
The landscape is green because it is on the windward side of the Pindus mountains (Greece’s mainland spine). Its ruggedness makes farming difficult, which seems limited to keeping sheep and goats. In fact, feta cheese is a speciality of the area. And we are eating a lot of Greek salad! Fish is also to be had, and the local prawns from the Gulf are famous. The local sole is also firm and delicious at this time of year.
Preveza is a gentle yet lively town that grows on you. The sunny weather helps, but if feels altogether cleaner and fresher than the wet and cloudy Sicily we left behind. And Preveza is not covered in a layer of volcanic ash. It is a working town as well as a local seaside destination for Greeks. There are little side alleys full of tavernas and one ouzeria. There are many water front bars overlooking the narrow neck of the Gulf towards Actium to the south. The island of Lefkas rises beyond.
Missy Bear is across the water and on the hard for the winter at Cleopatra Marina. Why is it so called, I hear you ask? Well, the marina is near the ancient city of Actium where the Battle of Actium was fought in 31 BC. The naval forces of Octavius’ Rome defeated those of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Antony's forces became trapped by land and sea, and he sailed through the neck of the Gulf towards the Ionian Sea in an attempt to break free from the naval blockade. The Roman ships were more numerous and also smaller and manoeuvrable. [This is a lesson repeated through history: small and manoeuvrable beats big and clumsy]. Cleopatra's fleet had been waiting nearby and helped save Antony, but Octavius pursued them both and defeated them at Alexandria (Egypt) the following year. As a result, Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.
Ancient Roman Nicopolis
As a symbol of his great victory, Octavius (later to become Roman emperor Augustus) decided to found Nicopolis, which is just up the road from Preveza. This not only reminded him of his victory in the Roman civil war, but also served as a strategic centre to control western Greece. The new city was populated by the forceful relocation of residents from nearby towns and cities.
We hired a car from Budget rentals at Aktion airport in order to visit the ruins of this ancient city. We got a taxi to the airport and arrived just before our pick-up time at 10:00. But when we got to the rent-a-car desk it was closed. In fact, most of the airport seemed to have shut up for the winter [Alix: that’s because it’s actually a military airport which is allowed commercial traffic between April and October, although I see EasyJet is starting a few flights in March 2022].
We waited a while and then I called a central number on my reservation document to ask where our car was. The Greek woman at the help-desk eventually said that she could not contact the local office by phone. I said, that’s probably because there is nobody there. She said she would email them instead, which did not fill me with confidence at all. And I told her so. But she said that is all she could do! Meanwhile, we asked a nice lady in the airport’s ‘special assistance’ booth if she knew if Budget would be open today. She did not know, but she did call a number and I heard her speak to someone called Maria. She assured us that the Budget rep would come in due course, but that she was late due to a problem with the car! Our car?
Eventually a woman appeared and headed to the Budget kiosk to unlock it. I assumed that this must be Maria. Maria wasn’t overly apologetic for being 45 minutes late. “I had a puncture in my car, so I couldn’t get to work”, she said rather cheerily. “What can you do?” she asked rhetorically.
I think I managed to hide my frustration. Actually, I didn’t at all. I did manage to negotiate a free tank of fuel by agreeing that we need not fill up the tank at the end of the rental. Under pressure, she even threw in the use of a TomTom SatNav for free. But that kit didn’t work.
Never mind. We WhatsApped our new sailing friends, Adam and Emily (who live with their cat [Alix: called “Tiny Cat”] on yacht ‘Hot Chocolate’), to say we would be collecting them from the marina after all, and that the excursion was not cancelled! We picked them up and headed north along the main road to Ioannina.
About 8km out of town, we swept around a long bend in the road and suddenly a massive, winding and long stone and brick perimeter wall hove into view. We were about to pass ancient Nicopolis.
We pulled into a layby, hopped out and made our way to an open gate and a small, empty ticket booth. There was absolutely nobody around. No visitors save for we four. We walked in, looked at an information board and then started to head for the site of the basilica, when a young, bearded Greek suddenly appeared from nowhere (like the shopkeeper in Mr Ben) and guided us back to his ticket booth, asked to see our Covid passports and advised us that entry was 4 Euros each.
With tickets in hand, we wandered up into the site. The new city was designed, as was usual, in a grid pattern with the surveyors first setting out the main north-south street (‘cardo maximus’) and then the main east-west street (‘decumanus maximus’) All the important buildings were then built around the central crossroads.
At the basilica, or remaining footprint thereof, we found some low, purpose-built shed roofs protecting some extensive Roman floor mosaics. We admired one that depicted deer-hunters in a central panel surround by a bordering sea with tessellated fish. Another mosaic with a similar border had a central panel of birds that resembled geese. They were all in remarkable condition considering they were open to the elements. Near our home in Cirencester there is a Roman villa at Yanworth run by the National Trust. The mosaics there are preserved in a special purpose-built building, controlled for temperature and humidity. Not so much care taken in Greece…
We walked to a gate - within the massive boundary wall at the top of the hill - that led to the odeon. But the gate was locked, so we headed instead to the footings of the main domestic building and its gardens. We marvelled at the panoramic view eastwards over the Gulf of Aktion and to the low mountains beyond, and tried to imagine what it might have been like to live in that expansive dwelling over 2,000 years ago.
We walked back to and along the main road for a few hundred yards and then through another massive portal to approach the odeon via different route. We succeeded in finding this quite well-preserved building, but again the entrance gate was padlocked shut. If we had managed to get in and sit on the top, semi-circular row of seats, we would have had a clear view towards the much larger Roman theatre about 1km away to the north. Perhaps members of the audience who were not enjoying their musical recital at the odeon could have gazed wistfully to the theatre and wondered if the audience there were enjoying their play more. But having researched the difference between an odeon and a theatre, I now know that the smaller odeon would have had a roof for acoustic purposes, so the listeners would have not been able to look out after all.
We drove to the theatre, further north along the main road, and it appeared quite massive. However, there was major reconstruction works ongoing, with JCBs, lorries and workmen, one of who advised me that we could not enter and could only walk around the outside. So, again, we didn’t manage to sit in the auditorium and imagine a play being performed on the stage far below.
Finding the Norman traces in Ottoman Ioannina
Some parts of Preveza’s warren of narrow streets feel a bit middle-eastern, which is a bi-product of lengthy Ottoman rule. And Preveza does feel different from any other place on Missy Bear’s voyage through, in part, this fundamental difference in history. Since the middle-ages, the western Mediterranean was fought over and divvied out between the Spanish, French and the German/Austrian Empire, with Britain helping one or another from the side-lines. This in turn shaped its architecture and art. In contrast, Preveza was occupied on and off by the Ottomans for half a millennium, from the mid-15th century until the First World War.
That’s not to say that western powers were always kept at arms-length, but it was usually the Venetians – just up the road at the head of the Adriatic Sea – who fought the Ottomans for control of this sea-route. When Napoleon seized all Venetian possessions in 1797, this happened to include Preveza at the time. But the following year, the Ottomans, under the infamous Ali Pasha, defeated and massacred the French and their supporters, known as the ‘Destruction of Preveza’.
Much earlier, in the early middle-ages, the Byzantines and Venetians had been trading allies for many years. We know this from my blog, ‘The Norman Conquest’ where I mention how the Venetian navy had helped the Byzantines to repel raids across the Adriatic and into Albania (now Greek Epirus) by the Norman Robert Guiscard in his attempt to advance from southern Italy to Constantinople.
As part of my pre-reading for our voyage, Alix bought me a book from Oxfam by Harry Enfield’s father (Edward). It is called ‘Greece on My Wheels’ and described Edward’s two-year cycling adventure. In the first year he toured the Peloponnese, and in the second he toured Epirus. In one chapter he described a beautiful lakeside town in the mountains. It was called Ioannina (pronounced Yannina). Since then, I had wanted to visit the town. With further reading, I had also discovered to my surprise that Ioannina had been controlled by the Normans, albeit briefly in the late 11th century.
So, I wanted to track them down. And as we now had a hire car, we continued northwards for an hour and a half into the mountains. The temperature dropped by four degrees Celsius as we climbed, the sky was slightly overcast and the trees had autumnal colours. Roadside shops were selling large squashes. Many of the plane trees in the town were already shedding their large, maple leaves. We started to feel quite autumnal.
Like many large settlements around the world, the modern suburbs are uninteresting, and often ugly and tend to sprawl out in an uncontrolled, wasteful and untidy manner. But keep pressing on into the centre and you almost always find an old, hidden gem nestled safely at the core. And Ioannina did not disappoint. The large, glassy lake under the metallic-grey sky with the mountains beyond could have been in the lakes of northern Italy. The strange juxtaposition that ejected us from this Italian dream was the appearance of the odd minaret on the skyline.
Ioannina may have been an Hellenistic settlement or may have been founded later by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. In several of my previous blogs I described how, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the western Mediterranean was occupied by waves of Germanic tribes. But the Balkan Peninsular (i.e., south-eastern Europe to the southern tip of the Peloponnese) was taken from the Byzantine Empire by different tribes, such as the Bulgars, who had moved in from further east.
The Byzantines reconquered this area in the 10th century and the city walls of the north-eastern citadel date to this time. The other citadel, in the south-east of the city, was probably built by the Normans around 1082. Robert Guiscard, in his advance on Constantinople via Albania, had left his son Bohemund in charge for part of the campaign. During that time, the son captured Ioannina.
So, I dragged Alix, Adam and Emily up a hill, through a gate in the massive walls and into the citadel to find evidence of his work. The citadel has been massively altered by the Ottomans and there is a small mosque on site. But there remains, in the centre of the site, a stout round tower and an abutting wall which archaeologists believe dates to that Norman occupation!
On our voyage on Missy Bear, we had discovered our most westerly Norman castle (southern branch!) at Erice on Sicily. And now we had found our most eastern (so far) in Epirus in the Balkan peninsular. Bohemond later took part in the First Crusade and became the Prince of Antioch from 1098 to 1111. Maybe in the future, Missy Bear will sail us to find even more easterly Norman ruins in ancient Antioch in the modern Turkey?
We know that the Byzantines regained control of Ioannina, because they gifted it to the Venetians in 1198. And then came the disaster of the Fourth Crusade which started in 1202 and ending un the unplanned sacking of Constantinople in 1204. This led to the partition of the Byzantine Empire into three rump states, of which the Despotate of Epirus [see first image, above] was one. It was founded by Michael I Komnenos Doukas. Ioannina was a small town at the time, but Michael gathered refugees who had fled Constantinople after the crusade. Despite frictions with local inhabitants (who tried to expel the refugees), the refugees were successfully integrated and helped the town grow and prosper.
Ioannina fell to the Ottomans in 1430. The new rulers were initially tolerant of Christian religion, but extensive uprisings led to the abolition of privileges. A church was destroyed, the monks were killed and the Aslan Mosque replaced it.
After a late lunch, the four travellers walked up a second hill towards this mosque, but unfortunately the site had closed at 3pm and it was now past 4pm. More locked gates and slightly frustrated tourists. We had to make do with a distant view of the towering minaret.
The most (in)famous Ottoman ruler of Epirus was Ali Pasha of Ioannina (1740 –1822), a clever, ruthless and brutal man of Albanian birth. But we ran out of time to explore this gruesome part of the town’s history. Maybe next time? We will certainly come across the Ottomans again, when our voyage south and east continues next spring.
Nevertheless, we had all enjoyed an interesting day trip to inland Epirus, and we now feasted on a stunning sunset over the hills and mountains on our drive back to Preveza marina. We didn’t take a photo, as they never do the scene justice. Instead, we just drank in the moment.
P.S. We are driving the hire car to Athens now and then flying tomorrow back to Bordeaux via Frankfurt with Lufthansa. It will be nice to spend a few weeks in Aubeterre doing autumnal things before we head off back to the UK. Then we wait to come back out to relaunch Missy Bear in April 2022!!