Visit it
Housed in the mosque of Aslan Pasha, ruler of Ioannina between 1600 and 1612, built in the 17th century, the Municipal Ethnographic Museum hosts three collections representative of the inhabitants of the Castle during its Christian, Jewish and Muslim evolutionary history. The museum was built in the place that was formerly in the Byzantine era, the temple of St. John the Baptist, which is said to have given its name to the city of Ioannina. The mosque of Aslan Pasha was built afterwards on the Castletown’s rock in 1618.
Today, you can visit the exhibition of the Municipal Ethnographic Museum at a site of paramount importance to the area and see the findings that are preserved from donations of eminent families of Epirus and date back to the 18th until the 10th century, such as arms and costumes from the period of the Ottoman domination of the region. In addition, the exhibition includes objects such as ecclesiastic silverware, vestments and books from the collection of Archibishop Spyridon, the elected Metropolitan of Ioannina in 1916.
The Jewish collection hosts costumes from the Jewish community of Ioannina, while oriental textiles of the past centuries, bronze objects from the time of Ali Pasha and Muslim books are displayed in the central part of the museum. A dwarf storehouse, the cave of Dionysius Philosophos, known to its enemies as a "Sculptor", and a medieval tower surround the main exhibition of the Municipal Ethnographic Museum, as there is the Turkish Library and Sufari Serai, the Ali Pasha Cavalry School, which you can visit. A tour of the Municipal Ethnographic Museum of Ioannina is enough for you to get acquainted with the history of Epirus and to get acquainted with the gianniotic traditions deeply rooted in the topography of the area.