Ioannina

People lived in the Ioannina basin 24,000 years ago, and in antiquity the Molossians had four settlements here. The founding of the city is traditionally credited to Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, though excavations have uncovered Hellenistic fortifications beneath the later walls, and the name — probably meaning "place of St John", after a monastery of St John the Baptist — first appears in 879. After the Fourth Crusade the city became part of the Despotate of Epirus; Michael I Komnenos Doukas enlarged and fortified it and settled refugees from Constantinople, and it grew rich and largely self-governing. A Jewish community is recorded by 1319. Serbian and Italian lords followed before the city surrendered to the Ottomans in 1430 on terms that respected its autonomy.

The revolt of 1611 cost the Christians their privileges and their homes inside the castle, and in 1618 Aslan Pasha replaced the monastery of St John with his mosque. Yet the city kept a Christian majority and prospered through trade with Venice and Livorno; merchants abroad founded schools that made Ioannina a centre of the modern Greek Enlightenment. From 1788 it was the capital of Ali Pasha, who ruled much of north-western Greece and southern Albania from its citadel until the sultan's armies besieged him in 1820; he was killed on the lake island in 1822.

A fire destroyed much of the city in 1869. Ioannina became Greek on 21 February 1913 after the Battle of Bizani; its Muslims left in the population exchange of the 1920s, and in March 1944 the Germans deported 1,870 of its Jews, almost all of whom were murdered at Auschwitz. The University of Ioannina was founded in 1970, and in 2019 the city elected Moses Elisaf, the first Jewish mayor in Greece, who served until his death in 2023.

Ioannina's identity rests on its many-layered past: Greek, Ottoman and Jewish monuments stand side by side in the Kastro, where the Aslan Pasha Mosque, built on the site of a Christian monastery, now houses the Municipal Ethnographic Museum. The Romaniotes, Greek-speaking Jews settled here since Byzantine times, gave the city a distinctive synagogue tradition; a small community remains, and emigrants return each summer to open the old synagogue. The city's long tradition of learning — an 18th-century writer claimed that every Greek author was either from Ioannina or a graduate of its schools — lives on in its university.

The city is known throughout Greece for silverwork, celebrated in a museum inside the citadel and sold in the city's workshops. Epirote music is led by the clarinet, accompanying dances that are mostly slow and heavy. The municipal art gallery, the Byzantine and archaeological museums, and the theatre at nearby Dodona give the city a cultural life larger than its size, and in summer 2023 a digital art exhibition on the lakeside drew more than 100,000 visitors.

Sport centres on PAS Giannina, the football club whose emblem is the bull from an ancient coin of the Epirote League, which has played several seasons in the Super League at the Zosimades Stadium. Local identity is strongly Epirote, and the city is often called Giannena or Yanina rather than by its formal name.

The 2021 census counted about 65,000 people in the city and about 114,000 in the wider municipality, a fall of 4.2 per cent in ten years. It is the largest city in Epirus, one of the poorest regions of the European Union, and the regional capital.

The university, with about 20,000 students, and two hospitals — the General Hospital and the University Hospital — are the great employers and keep the city young. Around them are regional government, commerce, the army's VIII Division headquarters in the centre, and tourism, which brings visitors for the castle and the lake and as a base for Zagori and Metsovo. The surrounding region lives on sheep and dairying, and Ioannina is known for the quality of its local milk, cheese, yoghurt and meat.

Life follows the student calendar, and the cafés of the lakefront and the old centre are the city's everyday meeting places. Winters are wet and colder than on the coast, with frequent frosts and occasional snow.

Epirus has a strong tradition of filo pies, and Ioannina's bakeries show it: kotopita with chicken, kasiopita, blatsaria and galatopita, a sweet milk pie, all wrapped in filo, belong to the strong pie tradition of north-western and central Greece. The city's best-known sweet is its own baklava, the giannotikos baklavas, layered pastry and nuts soaked in syrup.

The lake gives the tavernas their most distinctive dishes — frogs' legs and eel — served above all on the island. Grill houses serve meat from the surrounding pastures, and the region's dairies supply feta, galotyri and metsovone, the smoked cheese of Metsovo.

Tsipouro, the strong un-aged grape brandy of Epirus and Thessaly, is drunk with meze. Plenty of the city's social life happens over these small plates in the evening. Wine comes from the village of Zitsa, known for its white wine from the Debina grape, and from the Katogi vineyard of Metsovo.