NEW YORK – The East Mediterranean Business Culture Alliance (EMBCA) presented Ioannina in the Court of Ali Pasha Childe Harold Reconsidered at the 3 West Club in Midtown Manhattan on Jan. 19. The event drew a diverse crowd interested in learning about the complicated and controversial historical figure who continues to fascinate scholars and historians nearly two hundred years after his death. As Louis Katsos, President of EMBCA noted in his introduction on “Ali Pasha, Souliotes, and the start of the Hellenic Revolution,” Ali Pasha (1740- January 24, 1822), variously referred to as “of Tepelana” or “of Ioannina”, Aslan/”the Lion” was an Albanian Muslim ruler who served as an Ottoman Pasha of the Western Part of Rumelia – the Ottoman Empire’s European territory, then known as the “Pashalik of Yanina” (Ioannina in the Hellenic).
As ruler of Ioannina, he was one of the most interesting and powerful semi-independent despots in the Balkans from the mid-18th to the early 19th century and beyond. At the height of his power, he controlled and governed Epirus and current Southern Albania, Western parts of Thessaly and Macedonia in Northern Hellas and through his sons Veli Pasha and Salih Pasha effectively controlled the Morea/Peloponnisos and Vlore.
Taking advantage of a weak Ottoman government, he seized and expanded territory through a series of shifting alliances, consistently dictated by whoever offered the most advantage to him at the time – be it forming alliances with Napoleon to gain a seaport on the Ionian coast, or reversing himself after Napoleon’s Treaty of Tilsett with the Czar, to ally himself with the United Kingdom.
Ali’s military might consisted of a polyglot of forces – Skipetars/ Albanians, Hellenic Armatoli, Tartar cavalry Moors and Turks. Lord Byron visited Ali’s court in Ioannina in 1809 and immortalized it in his work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He noted besides the mixed feelings about Ali specifically, that the splendor of his court was “superior in wealth, refinement and learning” to any other Hellenic town.
Ali Pasha is a complex and paradoxical figure. He was known for his diplomatic and administrative skills (including setting up a sophisticated system of intelligence gathering), his interest in modern ideas and concepts, his legendary cunning, his religious neutrality, his vengefulness and harshness, and his looting of peoples and communities for personal gain. He generated both admiration and criticism by his contemporaries. The controversy continues today among historians regardless of background (Hellenic, Albanian, and Turkish). He is known as much for his achievements as he is for his atrocities – at Gardhiki and Hormova, executing in public the Hellenic Klepht Katsantonis among others, and the murder of Hellenic girls of Ioannina, the tragic story of Kyra Frosini and the 16 women drowned in Lake Ioannina for adultery in the year 1800, made famous in many folk songs and poems.
Also impacted by Ali Pasha were the Hellenic Revolution of 1821, the Souliotes, and the modern Hellenic enlightenment. Although his native language was Albanian, he spoke the Hellenic language, and it was the official language of his court and any foreign dealings.
The event began with a musical presentation by clarinetist Kostas Skarpetas who performed traditional songs from Epiros, including a Yanniotiko Syrto played when they walk the bride to the church on her wedding day. Katsos then gave his remarks and introduced the speakers, beginning with Elektra Kostopoulou, Rutgers University Department of History/Program in Modern Greek Studies and author of Autonomy and Federation within the Ottoman Empire. Her presentation was entitled The Era of the Alis: the Ottomans, Greek Nationalism, and European Expansionism at the Turn of the 18th Century. She spoke about Ali Pasha and Muhammad Ali, not the boxer, but the ruler of Egypt under the Ottoman Empire.
Katherine Elizabeth Fleming – NYU Provost and the Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization in the Department of History at New York University, author of The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece spoke eloquently about the historical figure. She noted that in Greek nationalist history, Ali is viewed as an arch-villain. Prof. Fleming said if she had titled her presentation, she would call it the contradictions of Ali Pasha, observing that all nationalist histories like everything in black and white, but the truth is more complicated and full of paradoxes much like Ali Pasha himself.
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