Ioannina, a city of networks

It is a metropolis that has achieved its own “mythology” throughout historical time. It seems like floating next to the mist of Lake Pamvotida, giving way to colorations and reflections, recalling one of the works included in the “Plásmata” exhibition. It lays bridges between the present and the past, the contemporary ancient drama performance and the memory of Dodoni. It offers the ideal location for rowing athletes and visitors to the monasteries on its Island. The one-mile lakeside road is “an escape within the city,” while the mansions, the museums, and the Rizareios School constitute “a refuge within History.” A sign of the new era: “C. Ioannina” group hosts digital nomads from ten countries, among them Canada, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Ioannina is a crossroads city that counts almost 1,500 years of life. A melting pot for Christians, Jews, and Muslims who once coexisted and shared a common life. A metropolis of multiculturalism, where chalices of the altars were made in Ottoman workshops and the members of the Romaniote community maintained the Book of Esther at their Synagogue.

However, it is also the metropolis of the Modern Greek Enlightenment, a city of networks in the Balkans and Central Europe, a “catalyst” for the release of creative capacities in the Greek territory and the dissemination of ideas. The shift during the second half of the 17th century toward artisanship and trade leads to the modern routes to Venice, Trieste, Vienna, and Livorno, as well as the Danubian Principalities or Saint Petersburg, where communities of expatriates are settled. The Greek language becomes the common base of communication throughout the entire network, necessary for the urbanization of merchants. “There, in Ioannina, the largest urban center of Turkish-occupied Greece, the Modern Greek Enlightenment established its headquarters and from there it conducted the battle against obscurantism, maintaining close contact with the hubs inland and abroad” George Finlay notes in “History of the Greek Revolution.”

The development of the initially bourgeois class and the offering on the part of Greek merchants abroad are closely related to the establishment of an impressive number of schools. Enlightened teachers introduce their innovative methods of teaching there. New courses are being taught in the field of sciences, while the figures of Eugenios Voulgaris and Athanasios Psalidas loom large, with the latter’s manuscripts presented by the Onassis Foundation in the tribute exhibition organized in February 2020 at the General State Archives of Greece (Historical archives – Museum of Epirus). The Schools of Ioannina and the mass production of philosophical, mathematical, astronomical, and geographical writings constitute the first efforts toward the dissemination of new ideas among the Greeks throughout the Ottoman territory. Most books are printed at the Greek printers of Venice, many of which have been founded by Giannotes, such as Nikolaos Glykys, Nikolaos Sarros, and Dimitris Theodosiou – another station in the network forged by the city. “Ioannina is famous for the discreet cultivation of education. It is a workshop of Physics, equipped with maps, Chemistry instruments, and a library containing fifteen hundred volumes of the three languages taught in the city’s college, enough to initiate the students into the knowledge of the sciences” writes the French philhellene François Pouqueville, appointed consul (1805–1815) in the court of Ali Pasha (pashaliq) by Napoleon. The next chapter was written through this revolutionary mixture of innovative spirit and humanitarian education: in 1828, the national benefactors Zosimades found the famed Zosimaia School, where Greek, Latin, Italian, and French were taught as primary languages.

The extroversion of the city persists today in the pulse bestowed to it by the major university campus, the musical experimentations of traditional music from Epirus with jazz, as well as the fact that the city is one of 100 European pilot cities committed to achieving climate neutrality by 2023, meaning the transition to zero greenhouse gas emissions.

In Ioannina in the year 2023, the rigidly defined boundaries between the center and periphery are dissolved. The local exports images derived from its art, rendering its message hyper-local. The city becomes once again the epicenter of a network of experiences, images, and data, embracing its manifold reflections, its very own Plásmata.