Along with us went a large family of Jews, seeking among the Turks a safer residence than the Ionian Islands, where just then the Jew was made very uncomfortable. As we halted at noon of the first day by a large oak-tree, on the shore of a brook, it was interesting to see groups, Christian, Jew, and Turk, taking their meals at quite an interval from one another, but all under the shade of the same tree. As we came into Joannina, the Jews were subjected to a searching examination, but we were not examined at all. We heard afterward that the father of this family was suspected of bringing a lot of letters, thus defrauding the Turkish Government of its postage fee.
But I have delayed so long over preliminaries that I can hardly be just to Joannina itself. In fact, to be just to Joannina one should write a book, and not an article. As one approaches the great plain and lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains, one feels that here, as now, must always have been the principal settlement of the whole region. The name Joannina (pronounced Yanina) appears in Byzantine annals as early as the ninth century, when mention is made of a bishop of Joannina about three hundred and fifty years after the last mention of a bishop of Dodona. Though not standing on the same site, it is the successor of Dodona. But its history is essentially Turkish. Perhaps its greatest distinction is that it was the capital of Ali Pasha, who, in the first twenty years of the present century, had established, by an energetic unscrupulousness which reminds one of Demosthenes's picture of Philip of Macedon, a sovereignty practically independent of the Sultan, almost as large as the Sultan's other European possessions. Ali had a sort of thirst for blood, which appears not to have belonged to Philip. The Greeks, however, seem to have forgiven him the slaughter of their fathers and mothers in deference to his genius, and to take a local pride in the monster. Most of the stories told about him are records of some murder or other. Most of the compliments which his satellites used to pay him turned on the idea that he was a good butcher. A place in the lake is still pointed out as the scene of the drowning of a dozen or so Greek women whose morals, forsooth, were not up to the high standard which Ali said he was going to set up. Some of them belonged to the best families in Joannina, and could not believe that Ali meant more than blackmail until the waters were closing over them, when they shrieked and grasped at the boat so wildly that the executioners had to become inhuman in order to carry out the commands of their lord.