The Jews of Arta belonged to the Romaniote tradition — Greek-speaking Jewish communities whose presence in the eastern Mediterranean stretches back to antiquity. Unlike the better-known Sephardic communities that arrived after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Romaniotes had never left. They spoke Greek, prayed according to their own ancient rites, and understood themselves as part of the Greek world even while maintaining their distinct religious identity.

Arta sat at the center of a regional Jewish network. The community maintained connections northward to Ioannina and southward to Nafpaktos, trading goods and, no doubt, ideas and marriage partners across Epirus. When refugees arrived — Jews expelled from Apulia and Calabria in southern Italy, later Jews from Spain — they were absorbed, carefully. Four distinct congregations eventually existed within the city: Kahal Toshavim (the original residents), Kahal Sicily, Kahal Calabria, and Kahal Apulia. Each congregation maintained its own customs. Tensions between them were real. But Arta held them all.

The community's spiritual life centered on its synagogues. The oldest, the Greca Synagogue, was established in the thirteenth century. Later came the Pulieza Synagogue, built by Jewish refugees from Apulia and Calabria. Each congregation carried its customs from wherever its families had originated, and those traditions mingled in Arta's narrow streets for centuries.

One of the most distinctive inheritances was musical. The Jews of Arta possessed manuscripts of piyyutim — liturgical poems — written in Greek or in a mixture of Greek and other languages, but transcribed in Hebrew letters. This practice, unique to Romaniote communities, speaks to a community that was Greek in its language and bones, Jewish in its script and faith, and something entirely its own in the space between. Families bore names that traced the geography of a diaspora: Baruch, Barzilai, Catalano, Romano, Russo, Philosof. The surnames alone tell a story of movement and rootedness, of families that had come from elsewhere and had finally, deeply, stayed.

By 1940, approximately 384 to 400 Jewish residents lived in Arta. When Italy occupied the city as part of the Axis control of Greece, relations between the Jewish community and the Italian authorities were, by the accounts of survivors, relatively tolerable. The Greek neighbors of the community tried to ease their burden. Life continued — altered by curfews and the required wearing of the yellow badge, but continuous nonetheless. Three years passed this way.

In September 1943, the Germans replaced the Italians. The situation transformed immediately. On March 24, 1944, a Gestapo unit from Agrinio arrived in the city. The Germans went to the City Hall and obtained the names and addresses of the Jews from municipal records. Using that list, they arrested 352 people. The community was concentrated in the Orpheus cinema, alongside Jews brought from Preveza. On April 2, 1944, they were transferred to the Haidari transit camp near Athens. Within days, they were placed on trains to Auschwitz-Birkenau. A small number of young people had managed to hide. Almost no one else survived.

The record of Arta during those months includes one figure who stands against the current. Bishop Spyridon Ginakas, the city's Orthodox bishop, approached the German authorities when they arrived and asked them to ease the burden on the Jewish community. They refused. Spyridon then advised members of the community to flee to surrounding villages and hide. Only a few heeded his counsel and escaped. His successor, Ignatios III, later testified to what Spyridon had done — that he had defended the Jews, understood their vulnerability, and done what was within his power to prevent their destruction.

In March 1946, an investigator named Kanari Konstandines visited Arta on behalf of the Central Committee of Greek Communities. His report was stark: both synagogues had been destroyed. The Jewish cemetery was gone. Shops and houses had not been returned to their former owners. There were no rabbis, no teachers, no communal institutions. The community that Benjamin of Tudela had found so naturally in place eight centuries before had been erased.

A monument was erected in 2000 in front of Arta's fortress walls, in memory of the victims. In April 2017, a few days after a memorial ceremony, it was vandalized with paint. The act of remembrance and the act of desecration arrived within days of each other, as they so often do.

Very little of the physical Jewish quarter survived the war. A fountain remains. A section of wall from the Pulieza synagogue survives, tucked beside a house that once belonged to the Chatzis family, in a neighborhood now largely rebuilt. The names recorded on the monument in the village square — Mizan, Nissim Mionis, Bassos, Sabas, Moussis, Chatzis — are among the few traces left of families who lived and prayed and sang in Arta for generations. The community was officially dissolved in 1959. The last of what had once been one hundred families, noted so casually by a medieval traveler, was gone.