Νικόπολις/Nicopolis, on the road from Ηγουμενίτσα/Igoumenitsa to Πρέβεζα/Préveza

On Wednesday 7th October, we headed off from Igoumenitsa. It sure was a good feeling to be hitting the road on our travels through Greece.

We are surprised at how very green it is, and this at the end of a long, hot summer.

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Our destination on our first day was the town of Préveza, 86km down the coast, mainly because it has a range of laundry facilities – needs must! The views on the mountain drive have been breathtaking, but it’s also terrible to see the effects of ongoing dumping at the sides of the roads. It’s hard to understand this behaviour when large refuse bins are widely available here, for free! The only efforts we saw being made to clean up the fly tipping was a digger which we saw covering over a large area of rubbish with soil 😨 It’s a significant problem.

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Shortly before reaching Préveza, we stopped to see the ruins of the city of Νικόπολις/Nicopolis. For a detailed look at Greek history through the centuries, check out this post:

Saul’s intro to the history of Greece – Krystal Ship Adventures

Now, over to Saul for the history vis à vis how Nicopolis came to be built:

Saul: Just south of Préveza is Άκτιο/Actium, where one of the most famous naval battles in antiquity took place in 31 BCE. After the murder of Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison), his adopted son Gaius Octavius fought the combined forces of Mark Anthony (Richard Burton) and his lover Queen Cleopatra of Egypt (Liz Taylor). Octavian forces won the day, and to celebrate what was the most expensive movie ever made in 1963, Octavius changed his name to Caesar Augustus, became the first Roman Emperor, and built a city nearby called Nicopolis, meaning ‘the City of Victory’. It is thought to have been the largest ancient city in Greece.  At its peak it was home to over 150,000 extras.

With this victory, the entire Hellenic world became subject to Rome, and this date signifies not only the end of the Hellenistic Age, but also the end of Ancient Greece. Greece would not regain independence for 1,850 years, on March 25th, 1821 with the revolution against the Ottoman empire.

Within five years of its foundation, Nicopolis consisted of city walls and a wide range of public buildings including a theatre, a stadium, a gymnasium, an odeon and an aqueduct.

The ancient Odeon of Nicopolis

With a capacity of 5,000, the Odeon hosted a wide variety of entertainment including poetry, musical contests, plays, comedy, and so on, every four years. An odeon was similar in design to a Greek or Roman theatre, but considerably smaller and usually featured a roof to allow for better acoustics.

There was a range of building styles and techniques visible here, some of which were designed to absorb movement of the building during earthquakes. 

The children were most entertained by the vomitorium – the passageway to the theatre underneath the seating area – so named after the Latin verb vomore, to spew forth… now they’re looking for vomitoria at all the sites we visit 😃

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Entering the nearby Stadium: all that’s left is the entrance passageway, and then a long, overgrown stadium:

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Further down the road towards Préveza, we came across the very long walls of the city of Nicopolis. At one point, the city walls would have enclosed an area of around 14,000 acres:

So, having looked in awe at the ancient walls and ruins of Nicopolis, we hopped back into the van and headed south towards Préveza…