Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  Of the coastal towns, Parga was the exception, holding out until it was sold to Ali in 1819. As part of his strategy of encirclement Ali possibly refurbished the nearby sixteenth century Turkish Castle of Margiriti, which guards the routeway north, and when he took the closer village of Aghia in 1814, he built a new castle between the village and Parga. The architect of the Castle of Anthusa was said to be Don Santo di Monteleone, an Italian serving in Ali’s army. Imposingly positioned on a hill visible from the town it is most likely it was placed there more as an act of intimidation as its guns would have been too small to put Parga within range. As at Preveza, the impression is superficial; the walls are too thin to withstand serious bombardment. Once he had possession of Parga, he built a citadel, serai and bathhouse on top of the old medieval and Venetian castle.

  Fig. 50: ‘The Castle of Parga in Epirus’ (1836) by Thomas Allom.

  Inland the border of Ali’s dominion was less defined. Ali maintained his defensive screen through alliances rather than by walls, but he did fortify or refortify places associated with his conquests and campaigns. Again the castles and walls of the established old towns were improved or new ones built, while in unruly areas new forts were imposed on the population, to form a latticework of key strongholds. To keep a vigilant eye on the Suliotes, high on a ridge on Mount Trypa, Ali built the Castle of Kiafa to control the passes into Suli. Built by a Greek, Kyr Petros, with bombproof magazines, casements and cisterns, and Leake thought, a large serai for the governor. Again most of the effort was expended on the imposing exterior, for Lear, who spent a night there, described the interior of the fort as having ‘several dilapidated courtyards’ through which one passed to reach ‘the inner serai or governor’s house - a small building with wide galleries round two sides of it’. At Paramythia, rather than building anew, the ancient Castle of Agios Donatos overlooking the depopulated town was used to house his Albanian troops. Ali built or upgraded the Turkish khans along the highways. Often these were more than just wayside inns for travellers. At the highest point (700m) of the major routeway between Ioannina and Arta there was the important khan at Pente Pigadia (Five Wells). In 1818 Ali upgraded this to a two-storey fort with cannon guarding his newly paved road. This may have replaced an earlier nearby Turkish fort dating from around 1760.

  Fig. 51: ‘Seraglio of Suli’ (1815) by Henry Holland.

  To hold the land north of Tepelene he improved the medieval fortifications at Berat after ousting Ibrahim Pasha. Once he had subdued the country between Tepelene and Avlona he fortified the key points along the course of the River Vjosë, the main north-south artery. In the other direction upstream towards Permeti and Koritsa (Korçë), Ali built a castle and serai at Klisura (Leake’s Klisúra), a strategic point where the Vjosë passes through a dramatic gorge. Ali’s castle, the ruins of which are still to be seen, Leake describes as built on a precipice ‘at an elevation of about one-third of the summit of the mountain’. It consisted ‘only of a square white-washed enclosure of a single wall, with a tower at each angle, but perfectly commanding the only road into the pass’. Built on the foundations of an ancient fortress to ‘curb the spirit of this district’, as Hughes put it, it overlooked a ragged and miserable population in the village below. Even more ragged gypsies lived amongst the ruins of what must have once been a more prosperous settlement. In contrast not far away at Premeti (Përmet) Ali’s youngest son Selim Bey, before he was removed to Argyrocastro, occupied a large serai above the town, which Hughes found

  fitted up with greater splendour than any we had seen except that of Tepeleni: it contained very fine baths and a beautiful kiosk, paved with marble, in the midst of which was a fountain: the serai is situated in a kind of paddock, to which extensive gardens are annexed; it is also surrounded by strong works.

  Towards Argyrocastro and Delvino, at Gardiki (Kardhiq), the site of his infamous massacre, Ali reinforced the late medieval castle with his trademark polygonal towers. Despite Ali’s desire to follow European fashion he still employed Ottoman architects. Ali’s Ottoman master architect was Petro Korcari, Leake’s Kir Petros. According to Leake the unfortunate Petro had not been paid after five years in Ali’s service despite being responsible for the building of a number of castles and serai for Ali or his sons. Petros, who remained Ali’s favourite architect from 1800 and 1812, was responsible for the magnificent Zekate fortified tower house or kullë in Argyrocastro built for Beqir Zeko, an administrator in Ali’s government. The house is the finest example of one of 600 similar fortified houses built in the town around this time and the gun placements in the walls are a reminder of the still unsettled state of affairs, or to quote Pouqueville, ‘distracted with sanguinary and endless contentions’.

  The Zekate house was built at the same time as Ali refurbished Argyrocastro’s impressive castle. The medieval castle of the Despots of Epirus on a high promontory overlooking the River Drino had been extensively improved by Sultan Beyazid II around 1490. From 1811, Ali modernized the fortifications, completing the full encirclement of the hill and adding emplacements housing numerous guns of British manufacture, employing around 2,000 workers; as usual in Holland’s opinion, working too rapidly in order to appease the vizier’s impatience. He added many new features, including a new seraglio within, accommodation for 5,000 troops, a curious clockwork mill for grinding corn designed by a Greek, and the Italianate clock tower on the eastern side. Leake had noticed a major weakness in that the site was deficient in water and Ali, to remedy this, built an aqueduct to bring water to the castle from a distance of over 10km from the surrounding mountains. A further drawback was that the castle was overlooked from above making it vulnerable to modern artillery, a point that Holland found it difficult to impress on him. In 1932 the castle was redesigned as a prison by the Italians at the request of King Zog.

  Fig. 52: Zekate House in Argyrocastro built by Petro Korcari, 1811–12 (photo Malenki).

  Ali’s legacy is not only military but most of his residences or palaces combined a defensive aspect. At Libokovo, Ali’s seraglio and fort built between 1796 and 1798 as a dowry for his sister has four polygonal corner towers and a curtain wall surrounding a wide courtyard. Though nothing remains of the interior, Shainitza’s grave can still be seen in the village. At Tepelene he created his grandest combination of fort, barracks and palace. He improved on the previous fortifications of the Byzantines and Turks determined to make his hometown a more impressive site. The castle built to enclose his palaces, and covering 4.5 hectares was finally completed in 1819. Hughes saw a town of 200 houses with an exclusively Albanian population and ‘no architectural beauties… except the grand seraglio’. Ali had built this ‘very spacious edifice standing upon a fine rock at the edge of the cliff’ overlooking the Vjosë on a site originally belonging to his father, Veli Pasha. It was destroyed in a fire in 1818 and rebuilt; the money raised according to Hughes, by Ali begging for donations from his subjects at the gate ‘seated upon a dirty mat, cross-legged and bare-headed, with a red Albanian cap in his hands’. The pedestrian bridge seen by Leake in 1804 that he built as a gift to the town to replace a ruined former one across the Vjosë, was apparently destroyed by flood by the time of Hughes’ visit and Ali was busy trying to construct a new one. This bridge links Tepelene to Beçisht, the village of his birth where the remains of his house are still visible.

  Fig. 53: The fortress at Argyrocastro by Edward Lear showing the aqueduct.

  At Ioannina, the main fortified area of the town, the Phrourion, is on a promontory jutting out into the lake with access gained by drawbridge across a moat. Ali replaced most of the old Byzantine walls adding round bastions and decorating its gates with ancient reliefs. Brewer suggests that in recognition of his title as the ‘Lion of Ioannina’ some of these reliefs show wild beasts. At the south-east corner of the Phrourion is the Its Kale, or ‘inner fortress’ built into the walls on three sides and in which Ali built a serai. Ioannina’s topographical situation is said to resemble that of the p
eninsula of Constantinople but on a smaller scale. Ali may have emphasized this resemblance by building this residence here at the end of the promontory positioned in the same manner as the Topkapi, the palace of the Sultan. The Ottoman government was known as the Sublime Porte after the impressive gate leading to the headquarters of the grand vizier within the palace and it is possible Ali had this in mind when he commissioned the gate for his citadel. To provide building material for the walls Ali destroyed much of the Christian district of Litharitsia to the south of the Phrourion. As at Preveza, Vaudoncourt was Ali’s chief architect and he was responsible for the Litharitsia, Ali’s principal fortified residence containing the seraglio, completed in 1815. Outside the citadel there was the Soufari Sarai, ‘horsemen’s palace’ or prosaically a cavalry barracks completed in 1820 which is still intact. In Hughes’ summary Ioannina possessed ‘two citadels, three palaces, besides a vast number of small serais’.

  Within the citadel he extensively remodelled the fifteenth century Fethiye Mosque in 1795, making it the main mosque within the Phrourion. The graves of his first wife and of Ali himself are located in front of the mosque. His flexible attitude to religion is reflected in his endowment of mosques, tekkes, dervish shrines and even churches. In 1813, Ali built a monastery in honour of his revered Saint Kosmas Aitolos in Kolkondas, the place of his execution. Kosmas was held in particular high esteem in nearby Berat and in Himara and is seen as an important spiritual figure by both Albanians and Greeks. Along with his improvements to infrastructure Ali was eager to leave his mark on the civic landscape, usually to bolster his own prestige. He encouraged the building of khans and caravansarais, had travel lodges to stay in for his personal use and pleasant country retreats to hide away to, and dotted the landscape with numerous serai or houses on a more modest scale such as the new house at Arta that Hobhouse saw or his mother’s fortified seraglio at Konitsa.

  Archaeology

  A perhaps surprising aspect of Ali’s rule is his connection to archaeology. The height of his authority coincided with an upsurge in interest in the existing and tantalizingly uninvestigated ancient Greek remains. Intrepid Grand Tourists, whose interest in Classical Greece was a nostalgic reminiscence from their schooldays, were increasingly accompanied by numbers of serious scholars. When Byron left Epirus to exchange the wily embrace of Ali for the comforts of Athens, he met the Danish archaeologist Peter Oluf Brønsted newly arrived from Rome with his friend Georg Koës and they became friends and drinking companions. Their group was enlarged by Cockerell, who had helped excavate the Temple of Aphaea on the island of Aegina. After conducting excavations on the islands of Kea, Aegina and Salamis, Brønsted joined Cockerell and the expedition of the Society of Travellers bound for the Morea where they gained permission from Veli Pasha to excavate the fifth century BC Temple of Apollo Epicurus at Bassae. Veli in the words of another antiquarian, William Gell, was ‘the most amiable of tyrants, not thirsting, as he said himself, for blood, but only for money’. Always on the lookout for some antiquities that he could exploit, Veli had developed more than a passing interest in archaeology. He had excavated at Argos and Mycenae and had the works of the ancient travel writer Pausanias translated into modern Greek, but his motives were fuelled by material gain. Some of his plunder ended up as building materials; one column from the Treasury of Atreus ended up in a mosque in Argos, three others in the Marquis of Sligo’s house in Ireland. The Marquis had continued work already begun by Lord Elgin. The carved green marble pillars would have flanked the entrance of the tomb.5 The Society’s most important find at Bassae was the temple frieze by Iktinos, one of the architects of the Parthenon. This was eventually sold to the British Museum, while the sculptures from Aegina went to Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, the father of the future king of Greece, Otto.

  In the autumn of 1812, Brønsted began to make his way homeward, first stopping off at Zante (Zakynthos) to see the tomb of his friend Koës who had died there of pneumonia. The next stop was Preveza where he intended to ‘re-examine the ruins of Nikopolis’, the Roman city founded by the Emperor Augustus to overlook the site of his naval victory over Anthony and Cleopatra at Actium. On arrival Ali received him courteously, speaking good-humouredly in Greek and impressing him with his astuteness and interest. Learning of Brønsted’s activities in the Morea, Ali became keen to know whether he had been one of those who had paid his son for the permit. When Brønsted answered in the affirmative, Ali showed even greater interest saying he also had some ‘old stones’ that could be excavated and that he would provide as many workers as required without cost on the understanding that he would have his ‘share of the marbles, and any precious things we find.’ By this stage Brønsted was eager to get home, but when Ali showed annoyance he reluctantly agreed to one visit to the ruins. A strange sight then ensued, Brønsted with Ali walking the length and breadth of the ruins, examining walls and discussing the history of the city, Ali being particularly interested in the Roman methods of construction. Despite Brønsted’s protestations that the city had already been plundered Ali was still keen to dig, so again Brønsted relented pointing out a suitable spot. Brønsted then protested that they were ill-equipped; undeterred Ali set his men to work while sending for better tools. After finding a number of marble slabs and two Roman coins they returned to Preveza where Ali failed to persuade Brønsted to carry out further excavations in Albania. He finally let him go with the gift of one of the coins.

  Fig. 54: Nikopolis by Edward Lear.

  This excursion was not a one-off. Ali accompanied Henry Holland to the Nicopolis where he made a strange sight sitting among the ruins while the excavations were in progress. Hughes tells us:

  There is one spot, where the agents of the pasha had been making excavations, upon which some superb temple must once have stood: the numerous marble shafts and pieces of entablature that are discovered, are all carried off to be worked up in his forts and serai at Prevesa - thus perish even the ruins of Nicopolis; and the monuments of Augustus’s glory serve to decorate the dwelling of an Albanian robber. Since our departure from Epirus I understand that his excavators have discovered a very fine bust of Trajan which now decorates one of the principal rooms in the Prevesan seraglio.

  Ali may have pilfered the ancient stone to build his walls but he showed a curiosity about the ancient past. To Everett he inquired about the possible location of the important site of Dodona, unknown at this time, his interest probably as much stimulated by his vanity as his greed for treasures. It would have satisfied his pride to be the first to make such a significant discovery.

  The Lost Legacy

  a vast but dilapidated khan as big as a Gothic castle, situated an a high range, and built… by Ali Pasha when his long, gracious, and unmolested reign had permitted him to turn this unrivalled country, which combines all the excellences of Southern Europe and Western Asia, to some of the purposes for which it is fitted.

  On his way from Arta to Ioannina, the young Benjamin Disraeli was forced to stay for the night in one of the numerous hostels for travellers that Ali had built. In 1830, the future British prime minister was another young man seeking adventure on the tour of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, ostensibly for his health. Writing to his father from Preveza, he gives an indication of the condition Epirus had fallen into since the demise of Ali. Desiring to visit ‘Southern Albania’, part of Greece then still held by the Turks, on the pretext of delivering a letter from Sir Frederick Adam, the governor of the Ionian Isles, he obtained permission for an audience with Redschid, the new grand vizir at Ioannina.

  Disraeli’s letter makes no apologies for his awe of the oriental; the thrill of being surrounded by colourful sights, pashas, beys, agas, military chieftains, sheiks on camels, the vizir’s troops, dervishes and the throng of the bazaar, with its mix of Turks, Albanians, Greeks and Jews, but unfortunately the country had become one he described as ‘this savage land of anarchy’. From Arta, ‘once a town… beautiful as its situation… in ruins, whol
e streets razed to the ground’, the journey took them through country presenting a

  mournful aspect, which I had too long observed: villages in ruins, and perfectly uninhabited, caravanseras deserted, fortresses razed to the ground, olive woods burnt up. So complete had been the work of destruction, that you often find your horse’s course on the foundation of a village without being aware of it, and what at first appears the dry bed of a torrent, turns out to be the backbone of the skeleton of a ravaged town.