Passing, for the first time, through the castle gates of the old city of Ioannina, into Its Kale – the citadel – and from there onto a giant expanse of open, green space dominated by two magnificent mosques, I couldn’t help but think of the word, maidan. Was I really in modern, northern Greece or somewhere in the Ottoman or even Mughal world, about to review – along with the populace at large – some pasha’s grand parade?

Ioannina, more generally, has that feel about it. It is clearly Greece but an older Ottoman, Balkan world still somehow wafts its way along the shimmering lake shoreline and through the city’s maze of bazari and alleyways. In 2024 the Greek Project is delighted to be making its first forays here and so to the spectacular mountain fastnesses of Zagorochoria and Tzoumerka. We’ll be running our ever popular week-long, Adventures Greek language course for intermediate and more advanced learners in Ioannina at the end of May and into early June. And later, towards the end of September (and again in the following spring 2025), we’ll be exploring more fully the historical, cultural, culinary and linguistic highways and byways of Glorious Epirus, centred on Ioannina. After all, that’s what The Greek Project is about : combining the pleasures of Aegean sun, good food, wine and atmospheric surroundings with a more flavoursome, even pungent recipe: study-tour holidays with intellectual bite.

That certainly means a return too, in mid-September, to Ellie’s home town of Xanthi in Thrace. Our Thracian Homecoming offers immersion into a vibrant multicultural Greece no longer present outside Thrace. Wander up into the lovely old town of Xanthi itself and the sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer harmonises evocatively with the bells from countless Orthodox churches. From Xanthi too, we’ll be able to retread our explorations of the dramatic Rhodope mountains, avian-rich Vistonida delta, classical Philippi and equally historic Kavala.

If Xanthi offers the feel of an intimate provincial city, off the beaten track for most visitors to Greece, our final mid-October destination, by contrast, is to the big city where The Greek Project began. Salonika, –  our first and constant love – may today be an irrepressibly  bustling metropolis, but scratch beneath the surface and one can find layer upon layer of the city that once was: the Jewish ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’; an Ottoman city full of sacred Muslim sites; a truly great Byzantine co-capital to Constantinople, full of resplendent, including paleo-Christian churches. Salonika : History, Culture and Cuisine is our pocket way of celebrating this great multicultural and not least culinary cross roads, quite often involving extravaganzas of hands-on cooking, eating and market wanderings. Our tour invariably also takes in among other places, Vergina, one of Greece’s archaeological sites par excellence.