Few public broadcasters can say they kept transmitting for two years after their government ordered them off the air. ERT Ioannina can. The regional station covering Epirus, broadcasting today on 88.2 in Ioannina and 100.3 across Arta and Preveza, traces back to a military transmitter built during the Greek Civil War and has survived one of the more dramatic chapters in modern European public broadcasting history.
Born as an Army Unit's Radio Station
The station began broadcasting in January 1949 on shortwave, built under the direction of Colonel Dimitris Zois as the radio station of the 492nd Battalion of the 8th Division of Epirus, right as the Greek Civil War was reaching its final stages. Early announcer Thanasis Karvelas later described the primitive setup: a Canadian C43 transmitter, a carbon microphone, two manual turntables, all crammed into a small room insulated with loose linens. The station shed its overtly military branding gradually, becoming a general Military Radio Station in 1957, moving to medium wave in 1958, and finally rebranding as simply Radio Station Ioannina in 1972 once military information services were reorganized.
Joining Public Broadcasting
The station formally entered Greece's national public broadcaster on July 1, 1988, as ERA Ioannina, and began FM transmission on January 19, 1991. That put it on the same footing as the rest of ERT's regional network, which today spans 19 stations covering every corner of Greece, with Ioannina's signal specifically built to reach all four prefectures of the Epirus region.
Two Years Off the Government's Books, On the Air Anyway
The station's defining moment came on June 11, 2013, when the Greek government abruptly shut down ERT nationwide, putting 2,656 employees out of work overnight in a move that drew international attention. Rather than go dark, the staff of ERA Ioannina kept broadcasting anyway, unpaid and unofficial, sustained by local volunteers and community support for nearly two years. The resistance was not symbolic, it was operational and it came at a cost: on New Year's Eve 2014, the station's transmitter was deliberately sabotaged. The staff kept going regardless, and when parliament voted to reestablish ERT on April 28, 2015, Ioannina resumed full official operations that June, a station that had effectively refused to accept its own cancellation.
A Region Worth Broadcasting From
Epirus carries a distinct cultural weight in Greek music, home to the polyphonic song tradition, a communal singing style shared across Greek, Albanian, Aromanian and Macedonian communities in the region, recognized by UNESCO in 2020 as part of its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices. ERT Ioannina's programming leans into that heritage, mixing regional news and cultural coverage with music rooted in Epirus's own folk traditions rather than importing a generic national format wholesale.
A Signal Worth Trusting
From a wartime army transmitter to a station that fought its way back onto the air against a government shutdown order, ERT Ioannina's history says something specific about what a regional broadcaster means to the place it serves. It is public radio in the most literal sense, kept alive at points not by official mandate but by the people who refused to let Epirus go silent.