1812 | Peter Oluf Brønsted Interviews with Ali Pacha of Ioanina

Danish archaeologist Peter Oluf Brønsted (1780-1842) was born in Fruering near Aarhus in Denmark and studied theology and philology at the University of Copenhagen. In 1806, he and his friend Georg Koës (1782-1811) set out on a grand European tour that finally led them to Greece and Albania. They arrived in Greece in 1810 where Brønsted met Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) and Lord Byron. In the winter of 1811-1812 Brønsted conducted excavations on the island of Kea. He also dug on Aegina and Salamis and then, with Haller, excavated the Temple of Apollo in Bassae (Arcadia). In September 1812, he travelled to Zante (Zakynthos) to see the tomb of his friend Koës, who had died on the island of pneumonia. His companion thereafter was the fifteen-year-old Count Nicolo de Lunzi, son of the Danish consul on Zante. On 12 December 1812, on their way back to Denmark, Brønsted and Lunzi stopped over in Preveza, which at the time was the southern border of Albania, to visit the tyrant Ali Pasha of Tepelena. Brønsted provides a good account of the Lion of Janina in his edition “P. O. Brønsteds Reise i Graekenland i Aarene 1810-1813” (P. O. Brønsted’s Journey to Greece in the Years 1810-1813, Copenhagen 1844). The English-language version of this account, “Interviews with Ali Pacha of Ioanina in the Year 1812,” was first published in1999 by the Danish Institute in Athens.

Mavi Boncuk |

Interviews with Ali Pacha of Joanina, in the Autumn of 1812; with Some Particulars of Epirus, and the Albanians of the Present Day