Ioannina- A City in Epirus

So, after we were done with Meteora/Kalambaka/Kastraki, we made our way across large swaths of Central Greece to Ioannina, the capital city of Epirus and the eighth largest city in Greece. Ioannina, as far as I can tell, is known for several things. One is its abundance of silver workers, two is its baclava, and three, perhaps the most interesting, is Ali Pasha.

Don't worry, you'll hear plenty more about him.

So, Ioannina is a nice place. But, as Catharine and I realized early on, our energy at this point was rather waning (perhaps from all the sleeping (or not sleeping- it was really cold) in tents) and we had a lot of time in which we didn't really need to do all that much, so we decided we were going to take it easy. Wander around a lot. Eat baclava. Etc.

So, on day one we decided to tackle the Frourio, which is the old part of the city. It's surrounded by walls.
That's the Frourio.
So is this. Note the twisty entrance way. That's so they could fight off invaders better or something.
Flowers!
Anyways, so the Frourio is actually sort of a normal neighborhood, and while it has some interesting things (like a mosque that you're going to see a few posts from now) it really is just like the old part of many Greek towns. The nifty part of the Frourio is the Its Kale, or the inner citadel. It has a lot of interesting ruins from a bunch of different periods and lovely views of Lake Pamvotis and the surrounding Pindos mountains.