ARTICLE (REFEREED) Voskopoja and Ioannina, Two Advanced Centers of the European Enlightenment in the Ottoman West Panajot Barka Eqrem Çabej University, Gjirokaster, Albania Corresponding author: Panajot Barka, Eqrem Çabej University, Rruga Studenti 6001, Gjirokaster, Albania, pbarka@uogj.edu.al DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v13.i3.7899 Article History: Received 16/09/2021; Revised 20/12/2021; Accepted 11/02/2022; Published 23/03/2022 Abstract This paper considers the impact of Enlightenment ideals before and during the Movement of the New Greek National Ideology during the 17 th to 19 th centuries. It is about Ioannina and Voskopoja, located today respectively in northwestern Greece and in southeastern Albania. In both centers, education was central to the spread of Western Enlightenment values, and attempts to communicate across the languages of the region were the main key. Voskopoja is a typical case of the flourishing of Enlightenment values in the service of economic and cultural development. With its defining basis of Hellenic culture, and its emphasis on secular knowledge, the purpose of education was ‘enlightening’ the hearts and minds of the Balkan peoples, seen as the only way to overthrow the Ottoman Empire. The ideological platform promoted in Ioannina, and on behalf of Greek nationalism, served as the basis for the platform of the Albanian national ideology. Keywords Enlightenment; Ottoman West; National Ideology; Greece; Albania Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 13, No. 3 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. Citation: Barka, P. 2021. Voskopoja and Ioannina, Two Advanced Centers of the European Enlightenment in the Ottoman West. Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 13:3, 68–80. https://doi. org/10.5130/ccs.v13.i3.7899 ISSN 1837-5391 | Published by UTS ePRESS | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/mcs 68 DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTEREST The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. FUNDING This research was funded by Institut Agama Islam Negeri Kendari, to which we express our gratitude.