Napoleon Bonaparte had other things on his mind. His garrison of 280 French grenadiers was stationed in Preveza, a small port at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf that France had inherited — along with other former Venetian possessions — through the Treaty of Campo Formio. The people of Preveza had welcomed the French warmly and formed a pro-French civic militia. But in October 1798, as Napoleon launched his campaign in Egypt, the local Ottoman governor Ali Pasha Tepelena attacked with an overwhelming force. The French were routed. Over the following two days, a massacre of both French troops and the Greek population who had supported them unfolded in the streets and at the port of Salaora. One hundred and seventy citizens who had fled to the mountains and returned only after Ali Pasha promised their safety were executed by the sword at the customs house. The horror of those October days, and the ideas of the French Revolution that had briefly ignited the city, burned into Preveza's memory and stoked the Greek nationalism that would flare into open revolt three decades later.
The name Preveza likely derives from a Slavic word meaning 'passage,' transmitted through Albanian as prevëzë — 'transportation, crossing.' It is an apt name for a city that guards the narrow channel between the Ionian Sea and the Ambracian Gulf, one of the most sheltered natural harbors in the eastern Mediterranean. The ancient Greeks understood its value: in 290 BC, King Pyrrhus of Epirus founded a town called Berenike nearby, named after his Egyptian mother-in-law. That earlier settlement is believed to lie on hills near the village of Michalitsi, about five kilometers away. The modern city sits on the northern tip of the peninsula, facing south across the channel. On 2 September 31 BC, within sight of these waters, Octavian's fleet destroyed the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium — one of the decisive naval engagements of the ancient world. Augustus built Nicopolis, 'Victory City,' just seven kilometers north to commemorate his triumph. Its ruins still stand, a grandiose ghost at the edge of a modest modern town.
Preveza has changed hands more times than most cities care to count. The Ottomans refounded it around 1477, but the Venetian Republic captured it in 1684 during the Morean War, lost it in 1699, won it back in 1717, and held it until the Republic itself dissolved in 1797. During the Ottoman-Venetian contest of 1538, Hayreddin Barbarossa defeated a united Christian fleet just off Preveza's shores — a victory that Turkish Navy still commemorates as a national holiday, and which gave its name to several modern Turkish submarines. The Venetians left their mark on the city's skyline: a clock tower from the eighteenth century still stands near the port, its proportions elegant and slightly incongruous against the whitewashed buildings around it. The Greek school founded in the city in 1779 by the Orthodox missionary Kosmas was the only school here for the entire eighteenth century. Education in a contested city was itself an act of quiet resistance.
After Ali Pasha's massacre, Preveza endured two more decades under his semi-autonomous rule, then came back under direct Ottoman control from Constantinople. The city became the seat of the Sanjak of Preveze in 1863. Congress of Berlin negotiations in 1878–79 attempted to cede the region to Greece; five meetings were held in Preveza itself, all inconclusive. Greek forces finally entered the city on 21 October 1912, during the First Balkan War, after the Battle of Nicopolis. Within months, in February 1913, Preveza witnessed something extraordinary: the first time in recorded military history that a pilot was shot down in combat. A Russian pilot flying for Greece had his biplane hit by ground fire near Ioannina and came down close to Preveza, where local townspeople helped him repair his aircraft and resume his flight. The city became formally part of Greece through the Treaty of London in 1913.
Today Preveza is a city of roughly 20,000 people, and on a summer evening the pedestrianized lanes near the waterfront fill with a sociable crowd — tavernas serving fresh fish and avgotaracho (the local grey mullet roe, a regional delicacy), cafes spilling onto cobblestones, children running between the legs of adults who show no hurry to leave. The Venetian clock tower keeps its own time at one end of things. The Ottoman baths of Ali Pasha Tepelena — the same man who massacred the city's defenders — stand as a monument of a different kind, their survival somewhat ironic. A marina handles leisure traffic; four museums offer context. The Archaeological Museum of Nicopolis holds some of the finest Roman-era finds from the surrounding area. And underneath the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf, opened in 2002, runs the Aktio-Preveza Immersed Tunnel — the only undersea road tunnel in Greece, linking Preveza to the Actium peninsula and shortening dramatically the journey to the island of Lefkada.
It is easy to enjoy Preveza without thinking much about its history. The setting encourages pleasure: the light off the gulf is bright, the fish is good, the pace is gentle. But the city carries an unusual weight of accumulated event. Octavian's fleet changed the course of Western history in these waters. Epictetus, banished from Rome, taught Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in AD 90, and his student Arrian recorded everything for posterity. Hayreddin Barbarossa's victory here shaped the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean for decades. The French Revolution reached briefly into these streets and was answered with a sword. Greek nationalism kindled here before it ignited everywhere. Now the undersea tunnel connects Preveza to the cape of Actium, where all of it arguably began — a modern passage threading beneath the same water that once separated empires.
Preveza sits at 38.958°N, 20.752°E on the northern tip of the Ambracian Gulf's mouth. The city is unmistakable from the air: a compact urban area at the end of a narrow peninsula, with open water on three sides and the enclosed gulf stretching eastward. The ruins of Nicopolis are visible 7 km to the north as low stone walls and earthworks in olive-covered terrain. The undersea tunnel connecting Preveza to Actium (Aktio) crosses the mouth of the gulf directly below the city's southern edge — invisible from the air but its approach roads are clearly marked. Aktion National Airport (LGPZ) lies directly across the channel on the Actium peninsula, approximately 3 km south of the city as the crow flies. Approach from the west at 2,000–4,000 feet for the classic view of gulf mouth, peninsula, and the sweep of Epirus coastline.