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. But this Albanian Mussulman reckoned ill when he threw down the gauntlet to the Sultan. Retiring to an island in the lake, when he could no longer defend his capital, he was first stabbed treacherously in a parley in which he thought he was going to make terms with his master, and finally killed by shots fired through the floor from the room under that in which he had taken refuge. His head and those of his sons, who had not well supported their father in the struggle, were fastened up over the door of the Seraglio in Constantinople. One afternoon, after conversing awhile with the successor of Ali, the present Vali or Governor-General of Epirus, if it can be called conversing to take a cup of coffee with a man, and see him smoke a cigarette, giving you meanwhile a few of his thoughts through an interpreter, we went over to the island, and saw the room in a monastery where Ali was slain. The floor was well perforated with bullet-holes.