town was already the central point of the national consciousness;
the capital of the learning of the dispersed nation, which was without a
political official centre. In the famous school of this town, afterwards
called [Greek: Zosimaia Schole] (The School of Zosimas), illustrious
professors taught Greek literature; and, according to the testimony of
many travellers, Jannina was the town whose inhabitants spoke the most
correct Greek. Our national historian, M. Papparigopoulos, speaks thus
of it in his French work, already well known and esteemed in
Europe[77]:--"Jannina especially became a true nursery of teachers, who
in their turn were placed successively at the head of other schools in
Peloponnesus, in continental Greece, in Thessaly, in Macedonia, at
Chios, at Smyrna, at Cydones, at Constantinople, at Jassy, at
Bucharest." The intellectual superiority of this town lasted until the
death of Ali Pasha and the creation of the new kingdom, when the centre
of the moral and political activity and work of the nation was
transferred to Athens, the town which, from its grand traditions, was
worthy to become once more the capital of the great Hellenic idea. But
the school of Jannina still remains one of the most renowned and the
most useful centres for the propagation of the learning and literature
of Ottoman Greece. At this day, for the foreigner who visits the capital
of the kingdom of the Hellenes, the first spectacle which will attract
his attention will be that majestic view of national monuments, worthy
to be compared with the most renowned monuments of the European cities:
these are the University, the Academy, the Polytechnic School, the
Arsakion, the Seminary of Rizari, &c., all eloquent witnesses of the
patriotism and self-sacrifice of the nation. Who are the founders of
these monuments? By what means have these brilliant ornaments of the
Hellenic revival been constructed? The greater part of their generous
founders are Epirotes, natives of Jannina itself, that town of which one
of the most illustrious _savants_ of regenerated Greece spoke with so
much appropriateness when he compared its school to a great river which
has given rise to several streams, which in their turn have watered and
fertilized all the other towns of Greece, but which to-day, contrary to
all reason and to historic truth, is represented as the Albanian
capital, and finds for this strange idea supporters who willingly
sacrifice the rights of popul