Epirus

Epirus is the historical and geographic region of the northwestern Balkan Peninsula divided between northwestern Greece and southern Albania. Mountainous and long relatively isolated from the rest of Greece, it was the homeland of the ancient Molossian kingdom and, in the fourth century BCE, of Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose costly early victories against Rome gave rise to the phrase Pyrrhic victory; the region later formed the medieval Despotate of Epirus before passing under Ottoman and eventually Greek and Albanian rule.