My friend, Mr. Arthur Hill, the British Vice Consul at Piræus, being about to make a business trip through Epiros in the spring of 1891, invited me to join him. Without this invitation I should have travelled Greece very unsymmetrically, leaving out all the country west of the great Pindos range. It is fair to call this Greece, although, in defiance of the arrangements of the treaty of Berlin, most of it remains politically Turkish.
At Patras we took a little Greek coasting steamer late at night, and, with only one incident worth mentioning, arrived a little after noon the next day at Prevesa on Turkish territory. The one incident was a stop of an hour in the wonderfully retired harbor on the east coast of Ithaca. If Homer had this in mind in describing the harbor of Phorkys he might well say that the ships needed no cable there. Even half an hour on shore for a short Homeric reverie was something to be thankful for. On our boat was a man who looked for all the world like the weather-beaten Ulysses returning from his twenty-years' absence. To my disgust he did not get off at Ithaca to hunt up Penelope, but went on to Leukas.
Arrived in Prevesa, I was made aware that we were off the beaten track by being informed that a letter which I had hastily written to send back to Athens would not even start for six days. This impression was deepened by the information that the British Consul at Prevesa had, during the seventeen years of his sojourn there, never thought of going to Joannina, two days into the interior. This was our goal. The excitement of visiting a country absolutely devoid of tourists is so rare that one may be pardoned for giving way to it.
Of course one cannot travel here without an escort. Two mounted men accompanied us everywhere in Turkey, and when we again came over the Greek frontier we were met by a sergeant and six privates.
Our first day was nearly all spent in skirting the gulf and plain of Ambrakia. One need not be impatient to get away from that beautiful region. The first object which drew our attention was the ruins of Nikopolis, about an hour out from Prevesa. The city was founded by Augustus as a magnificent trophy of his victory at Actium, at the foot of the hill on which he had pitched his tent before the battle. On sailing into Prevesa the day before, we had passed over the very waters once enlivened by that combat, and over which Antony, forgetting for once to be a soldier, followed the wanton queen in flight and left the world to Augustus.