City on a lake in the Pindus mountains — Ali Pasha's Ottoman fortress and Greece's silver-working capital
Ioannina is the capital of Epirus and the largest city in northwestern Greece — a city that sits on the shores of Lake Pamvotis beneath the Pindus mountains, with a well-preserved Byzantine and Ottoman citadel (the Kastro) on a peninsula jutting into the lake. A small island in the middle of the lake holds the monastery where the Albanian Ottoman warlord Ali Pasha was assassinated in 1822. The city is Greece's traditional centre of silver jewellery and metalwork, and its feta is considered by many Greeks to be the country's finest.
Ioannina rose to prominence under Ali Pasha of Ioannina (1740–1822), an Albanian-born Ottoman ruler who carved out a virtually independent fiefdom in northwestern Greece and received European visitors including Lord Byron. Ali Pasha's court was cosmopolitan and brutal in equal measure; he was eventually assassinated on orders from the Sultan in the monastery on the lake island, where the bullet-holes in the floorboards are still shown to visitors. The city fell to Greek forces only in 1913, during the First Balkan War — it was the last major Greek city to be liberated from Ottoman rule.