The Clouds of Ioannina

The Clouds of Ioannina is a collection of writings inspired by the multicultural history of northwestern Greece. In the early 20th century, before the region of Epirus changed hands from the Ottoman Empire to the Kingdom of Greece, the regional seat of Ioannina was home to a community of Romaniote, Greek-speaking Jews, who have all but vanished from the land. The Clouds of Ioannina chronicles episodes of a community facing a long, losing battle with cultural survival. The book's eleven essays describe life in Ioannina and its multi-ethnic and interfaith cultural diversity. Five poems convey the journey of travels from Greece to Turkey, and six interviews feature wide-ranging conversations, some posthumous, with leaders of the Jewish community of Ioannina and their diaspora in the US. Deep in the Pindus Mountains of northwestern Greece, a multigenerational story of return to a highland lake town reveals insights older than the castle district of its medieval heritage in this collection of essays, poems and interviews by an American writer based in Istanbul with Greek- Jewish roots.