Albania, and the Awesome Gem that is Berat
One of my favorites in the Balkans.
Albania is blessed with an easy Mediterranean climate, and host to both some great beaches and plenty of mountains. It feels threadbare, even compared with some other Balkan nations, but that is part of its attraction. It is cheap enough that the budget traveler can get on quite easily. Infrastructure has that rough feel, as though lack of funds has demanded improvisation. The bus station may be a cacophony of minivans, but someone will point you to one going your way within minutes. Great little family restaurants abound, with just a handful of tables. Everywhere, you feel that the country is going through a transition, adjusting to the shock of becoming so popular. But enough tourists have already come through that people have stopped being curious about them.
It appears that the beaches of Albania were the first attraction to hit the tourist market. Maybe as a saner alternative to what Croatia has become, a bit sandier, and an easy trip for Italians looking for their lira to stretch a bit further. As a result, the towns of Vlorë, Durrës, and Sarandë have been fully given over to the beachgoer set. A forest of rental chairs and umbrellas greet you long before you can step into the water. Admittedly I’m not into beaches: Other travelers I met were more enthusiastic about them than I was.
Stepping backwards through time, there is a lot of viewable history here, starting with ancient Greek and Roman colonial ruins. You can get snapshots of what was going on from there up through the 20th century.
The Ottomans spent many years here and left the legacy of Islam on the population. Almost 60 percent of Albanians are Muslim. This makes for the curious occurrence of the call to prayer in some cities, a feature shared, in Europe at least, with only a few other places in the Balkans. Albanian Muslims have clearly taken a soft approach to their faith, opting out of many of the normal restrictions.
All religions in the country suffered a great deal during the ‘dark years’, when the government actively destroyed symbols of religious observance, replacing it with pseudo-worship of the State.
Albania would have been much more fortunate, had it become part of Yugoslavia. But instead, after enduring occupation by Mussolini in his failed efforts to create an Italian empire, it exited World War II straight into the clutches of arguably one of the worst dictators in modern history, Enver Hoxha.
One thing you see quickly in Albania is that the ‘dark years’ of 20th century history are burned deep into the social consciousness. It is recent enough that I met people my age who lived through the final decades. “They [government agents] took my grandfather to those hills,” the taxi driver waves his hand at the horizon, “And we never saw him again. No one can tell us where he is buried.”
And the madness only really ended in 1992, when the regime’s continuation under Hoxha’s successor finally collapsed.
Rarely have I seen, anywhere, a leader more universally hated. Even Stalin gets a museum slavishly dedicated to his fine works, in his birthplace of Gori, Georgia. Hoxha, who led Albania as an isolated prison of fear and oppression from 1946 to 1985, left not one iota of sympathy for future generations to draw nostalgia.
I only mention him because the shadow of the past hangs so heavily over the country. You rarely go a day without being reminded of it. There are several very worthwhile museums where you can learn more than you ever wanted to know. I went to two of them. One is called Bunk Art 2 (there is also a Bunk Art 1), in the capital Tirana, and the Site and Witness Museum in Shkodër. There are displays in these museums you may not want your kids to see. They are meant to be, and are, very brutal reminders of how badly humans can treat other humans.
I toured Albania from the border of Montenegro in the north to Sarandë in the extreme south, just a short ferry ride from Corfu. The town that captured my imagination the most was Berat.
This city sits at a narrow river passage between two steep hills, a natural defensive position to control anything further upriver. I arrived here in August, warmest month of the year. The bus station is inexplicably far from the center of town, located downstream where the tight valley spills out into a wide river plain. The road going upstream skirts the northern hill, capped by a thick forest of pines and a crumbling citadel.
The first thing that struck me upon entering the ‘old town’ was the architectural congruence. A lot of effort has gone into keeping a traditional look. The style is Ottoman: heavy, dark wood window frames, white walls, and red roof tiles. Row upon row of them march up the steep hill. The best place to see a curated example of this house type is the Berat Ethnographic Museum, about halfway up the exhausting, cobblestone road to the citadel. It contains a wealth of household items typical of the Ottoman style. Across the river, on the south side, is the historically Christian district, with similar architecture, but with Orthodox churches replacing the mosques.
Berat has many little guesthouses in the old town. Ours was up a hill that proved almost too challenging for the taxi. Within an hour of arriving, we were hit by a rainstorm that turned all the streets into raging torrents.
The Berat Citadel that looms over the city has a long history, not dissimilar to any geographically strategic viewpoint in the Balkans. The Romans were here continuously up through Byzantium, then in and out of many an early Orthodox Christian empire until the Ottomans cleared house in the 16th century. There is a fair bit left of old buildings and walls, and winding cobblestone alleyways. The fascinating and densely packed National Iconographic Museum Onufri is here, housed in an Orthodox church.
You miss out on the real energy of the town if you don’t go out at night to Bulevardi Republika. As with several other towns we visited in Albania, there is a designated hangout for everyone who wants to see and be seen. The Bulevardi, paralleling the river, is Berat’s version. All age groups are out in force, cruising from one end of the pedestrian walkway to the other. Old men fill the park benches, leaning on their canes and watching the people pass by, in that distinctively Mediterranean way. There are a ton of great cafés, bars, and restaurants here, and they aren’t all just full of tourists. Well, not yet at least.
There are worthwhile sights to see upriver from Berat. We took a group tour, with a very informative guide, on a full day trip that involved hours of driving up the bumpy, winding roads. A trip in that area is very difficult to do by public transport alone.
Up here, near Poliçan, are the rusting factories that used to produce machine guns and other armaments during the ‘dark years’. Also tunnels, dug deep into the mountainsides, where supposedly Hoxha and his cronies conspired to hide gold and other valuables in case of invasion. What a relief to see all of this left to rot and overgrown with trees.
The Osumi River has carved the deepest canyon in Albania, about 200 meters deep. There is a good viewpoint, where an elevated walkway takes you right up to the edge of the cliff.
There are many things to see up and down this valley and its tributaries. Icy cold waterfalls, walks along the cliffs, and a tiny hut containing the supposed footprint of Abbas (youngest brother of Husayn, who is in turn grandson of the prophet Muhammad). This hut is the starting point for the annual pilgrimage by Albania’s Bektashi Muslims up to the top of Mt. Tomorr.
Albania is full of these little histories, a place caught between the classic cultural narrative of the East and West. And one feels the bond that years of repression has forged between its citizens. The people of Berat, during World War II, sheltered Jews who were being persecuted elsewhere. Having no synagogue, they were permitted to worship using the town’s main mosque. A Star of David still exists on the wall as testament to this act of cooperation.
“We in Albania don’t have a problem with anyone or their religion,” a resident of Berat told me, “Hoxha tried to make us suspect and hate each other, but in the end, he just made us more the opposite.”
Berat tops my list of places to see in Albania, a country that feels a world away from others in Europe. Quirky and warm-hearted, it is lurching fast into the future but still trying hard to shake off its fearful past. Well worth the effort to get there.
For an article of mine on another destination in the region:
