A journey through ancient Albania

On the shores of Lake Ohrid, at the ancient monastery of Saint Naum, I found a new drinking buddy: Dongo, the monk. I was touring Albania with Elvis Nanaj, my driver, and we had crossed the border into North Macedonia for an afternoon, following the shoreline eastward to visit the monastery. A long avenue of poplars led over a bridge to a cobbled courtyard where a pair of peacocks shrieked and fanned their tails. 

The interior of the monastic church at Saint Naum has not changed in a thousand years. It was narrow and cramped, with doorways so low I needed to bend double, and a floor of huge uneven flagstones polished by a millennium of footfall. Frescoes of saints and prophets swarmed over the walls, and coppery icons glowed in the light of candles and oil lamps. When the British writer Rebecca West visited in 1937, she found that the monastery acted as a refuge for the insane; a monk was singing arias from Madam Butterfly to two distressed people to cure them.

Dongo sat just outside the entrance in a small booth selling postcards and candles. He looked like Moses in the wilderness years, bald, plump, with a long straggling beard and a messianic gleam in his eyes. We chatted. He presented me with gifts from his booth — a key ring, a locket with an icon inside, a black-and-white postcard of the monastery. 

Then he winked and took down a bottle of the monastery’s “miracle raki”. “Fifty-two per cent proof,” he whispered. “But all natural, so no problem.” He poured two glasses and we toasted one another. The raki had astringent notes of pine and lighter fluid, with a lingering finish of plums. Dongo poured two more glasses. I asked how long he had been here, in the monastery. Too long, he chuckled. He had come out from his little shop now to sit with me on a stone bench. He refilled our glasses. I asked how many monks there were. “One,” he chortled, slapping his thigh. “For everything — postcards, liturgy, chanting, candles, garden, peacock, everything.” He refilled our glasses.

I spent 10 days in Albania, touring with Elvis, roaming from mountain retreats to coastal bliss, from monasteries to safari camps. The country was fascinating and beautiful, and the people overwhelmingly friendly. Ancient sites like Butrint and Apollonia had some of the finest classical ruins in the Mediterranean. In the interior, mountains unfolded across long distances, with ancient Ottoman towns commanding their valleys. Roads were good and the restaurants jolly places of endless courses. But travel here was across decades as well as mountains. At times Albania felt like the Europe of our great-grandparents — horse-drawn wagons, shepherds herding flocks, men scything wheat by hand and winnowing chaff with the wind.  

Through the 1950s and ’60s, when Albania was the kind of isolated communist state that would make North Korea seem cuddly, one window on the outside world came from the films of Norman Wisdom, the cheery English comedian, the only foreign movies to pass the strict censors. Perhaps his popularity is understandable, the Wisdom world of inane absurdities and slapstick nonsense striking a chord in a place where not much really made sense. In 1995, after the fall of communism, Wisdom was made a freeman of Tirana, for having made Albanians laugh in an era of such dark tyranny.

Tirana is a more charming city than people give it credit for. There are cafés with outdoor terraces, a fine concert hall, a great archaeological museum and some gripping modern museums that catalogue the idiocy and horrors of the communist period. But I was happy to get out of the city into wide agrarian landscapes. I had headed for Lake Ohrid in search of the Illyrians. Not much has been heard of Illyria, a pre-Roman civilisation in the Balkans, in the last two millennia, and our sense of them is somewhat hazy. There were said to be tombs at Selca in the hills above the lake.

At the end of a white road, near the village of Selcë e Poshtëme, an elderly woman with two chickens under her arms pointed us to a track. I waded through wild flowers to a low cliff face where I found classical facades carved in the soft rock. It seemed a wonderful place to be dead, adrift here among vines and olives — a soothing sense of timelessness, a backdrop of mountain peaks hinting at the eternal, banks of wildflowers on the slopes like floral tributes. I sat on the step of one of the small tombs, and watched the butterflies. There was birdsong, the sound of sheep bells, distant children’s voices, the high ringing note of cicadas. Dogs barked, farmyards away. I was alone with the ancient world.

It took Shakespeare to make Illyria a metaphor which was probably why I was here. The name seemed to carry some sense of romance and mystery. When Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked on the Illyrian coast at the beginning of Twelfth Night, there is the sense that they have escaped their own restricted worlds for a never-never land where nothing is as it seems, where everything is turned on its head, where nonsense becomes reality, some Elizabethan version of Norman Wisdom. It was an idea that seemed to follow me around Albania.

For five centuries, Albania was ruled by the Ottomans, becoming independent in 1912 only to be invaded by the armies of six different powers following the start of the first world war. After the war, an attempt was made to build a national consciousness. It was rumoured that the throne was offered to the English cricketer, CB Fry, but in the end, they got King Zog.

Zog was very much a man of his time. He sported the kind of dubious moustache beloved of 1930s dictators. He imprisoned his opponents, invented his own salute — the Zogist salute — and smoked 200 cigarettes a day. He was said to be the object of no less than 600 blood feuds — very much an Albanian thing — and survived more than 55 assassination attempts, one on the steps of the Vienna Opera House after a performance of Pagliacci.

Anyway, Zog survived. But eight years later, as the Italians annexed Albania, he fled into exile taking with him most of the gold in the vaults of the Bank of Tirana and Durrës. Thereafter he led the nomadic existence of an exiled monarch, including a stay in the Ritz in London, in the days when you could still settle your bill with a gold brick, before eventually coming to rest in Paris where the smoking caught up with him. He died at the age of 65. 

Zog had kept political opponents locked up in the medieval dungeons of the citadel of Gjirokastra. An ancient town of steep winding lanes, Gjirokastra’s houses are clustered together, their ash-coloured stone roof tiles like the scales of strange beasts that have clawed their way up the slope to huddle beneath the castle walls. The image belongs to Albania’s greatest writer, Ismail Kadare, a Gjirokastra native. He called the town bizarre and dreamlike.

Kadare’s former house is now Gjirokastra’s ethnographic museum. It is a place of carpets and costumes, of velvet gowns and brocade waistcoats. The museum holds all the contradictions of Albania. One moment it is splendid tasselled shoes, known as opinga. And the next it is black and white mug shots of executed clergy, the feared enemy of the communist regime — Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic and Bektashi.

But it is the house itself, rather than its exhibits, that is the star turn. There is an intimacy about Gjirokastra’s old Ottoman houses, which accommodated multigenerational families. The pattern is labyrinthine, almost secretive. Livestock inhabited the ground floor, every room came with inviting cushioned divans, and a special bedroom was assigned to newly-weds, at a respectable distance from others. The seclusion of women was central to the architecture; all over these houses are secretive galleries where women, seated behind lattice woodwork, could follow conversations and arrangements without being seen by visitors.

Above the rooftops of Gjirokastra’s houses is the castle, a cavernous colossus, a warren of passageways and battlements and vaulted chambers. A long ramp leads down into the dungeons where, in a dark octagonal chamber, prisoners were chained to the wall. The prisoners were there in the early 19th century, in the time of the sadistic Ali Pasha with whom Lord Byron had tea — the pasha was obsessed with the poet’s delicate white hands and pampered him with sweets. They were there in the time of King Zog. And they were still there through the communist period, holding the opponents of the communist leader, Enver Hoxha. At least until 1968, when — in some Albanian echo of the summer of love — they decided to hold a folk festival in the castle and worried the wails of prisoners might disturb the peace songs.   

Hoxha is Gjirokastra’s other famous son. Albania’s communist leader for almost 40 years until his death in 1985, he still hovers over Albania like a dark cloud. In 10 days in the country, I never heard anyone say his name. Like everyone else, Elvis referred to him simply as the dictator.

When the old regime finally crumbled in the early 1990s, the Albanians received a shock introduction to cowboy capitalism. Pyramid schemes sprang up offering untold financial rewards to a naive population who thought this must be how capitalism worked. People mortgaged their houses, their farms, to invest. As the Ponzi schemes all predictably went bankrupt, about two-thirds of Albania’s population lost their savings. It was the trigger for an outbreak of violent anarchy in 1997 so severe it needed an international peacekeeping force to put the country back together again.

About 45 miles to the north is Berat, another Ottoman-era city but one whose history stretched back 2,400 years, beyond even the Illyrians. Its whitewashed houses rising up the steep hillsides seem to stand on one another’s shoulders, their rows of stacked windows reflecting the light. In the winding lanes of the citadel, I came upon St Mary’s Church, now a museum of the paintings of Onufri, one of the great 16th-century icon painters. Above the iconostasis, the life of Christ is illuminated in glorious reds and blues beneath gold skies. They may have been a couple of centuries later, but these paintings are the eastern equivalent of Duccio and Giotto, stylised, luminous, and haunting. They are beautiful but in these dark spaces you notice how the narrative focus is invariably tragic, a kind of endless keening over betrayal, crucifixion, martyrdom, death.

There is another religious tradition in Berat. In the cobbled square behind the King’s Mosque, I found a teqe, or place of worship for a Sufi order that came from Turkey in the 16th century. A contemplative and often independent form of Islam, Bektashism flourished in Albania, long after it was banned in Turkey as being heretical, and the world headquarters of Bektashism is now in Tirana. But the teqe was empty. As with many places of worship in Albania, over four decades of official atheism had robbed it of most of its adherents.

It was a modest but exquisite building composed of a single square room. An octagonal dome seemed to float above it. The walls were whitewashed and plain except for the frames of the doors and windows and the little cupboards set into the walls which were painted with intricate designs. Sun angled down from a high clerestory of windows across the ancient floorboards. I sat alone for a long time in this celestial room on one of the low benches round the walls, savouring the meditative stillness. Tired of waiting, the guardian left me the keys to lock up. “Just put them under the flowerpot when you leave,” he said. “That’ll be fine.”  

More Albanian adventures

Skiing the Accursed Mountains Pressed up against the border with Montenegro, the Valbona valley was notorious in the 1990s as a place of banditry and blood feuds, and blighted by severe depopulation. Now, though, it is enjoying a dramatic change of fortunes, its pristine limestone mountains and rustic hamlets being discovered by hikers and even a small number of skiers. Since 2019, Slovenian mountain guide Rok Zalokar has run a pioneering heliski operation in the valley for a couple of weeks each winter, offering the chance to be among the first to enjoy deep-powder descents in its high bowls and couloirs. A week’s heli-skiing costs from €8,950; heliskialbania.com

Hiking the Peaks of the Balkans Trail Launched in 2013 to promote peace and provide employment in the mountains of Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania, the circular Peaks of the Balkans Trail runs for 192km using paths used for centuries by shepherds, traders and smugglers. Mountain Kingdoms’ guided group trek traces part of the trail, starting in Montenegro among the shepherds huts of the Štavna plateau. The second day’s walking passes over the Peja Pass into the Theth Valley in Albania, with luggage carried by packhorses, and subsequent days continue east into Valbona. Group sizes are between four and 12 people; the eight-night trips depart on July 27 or August 31, from £1,535 per person; mountainkingdoms.com. See also peaksofthebalkans.com

Ancient Albania Led by an expert lecturer, Martin Randall Travel’s group tour aims to explore Albania’s role as a “crossroads of antiquity”, with an itinerary encompassing Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman sites. Starting in Kruja, Albania’s medieval capital, the trip heads south to Durrës, a key port for both the Greeks and the Romans, then Berat, the Illyrian city of Byllis, and on to Apollonia and Butrint. A nine-night trip costs from £3,050, with departures in April and September; groups number between 10 and 22 people; martinrandall.com

Coastal trails Along much of the so-called “Albanian riviera”, rugged mountains rise directly from the turquoise waters of the Ionian Sea — the highest reaching more than 2,000 metres. Wild Frontiers’ group walking tour takes in some of the area’s most beautiful landscapes, including Llogara National Park and Mount Çika. There’s between three and five hours of hiking on most days, but also time to swim and explore historic sites. A seven-night trip costs from £1,675, with departures in May, September and October. wildfrontierstravel.com

Cycling the south About three-quarters of Albania is covered in hills or mountains, so expect some ups and downs on Explore Worldwide’s week-long group bike tour of the south of the country. Starting at Lake Ohrid, it covers 358km over six days mostly on quiet rural roads, heading through the Gramos mountains and Vjosa valley, then riding along the coast from Butrint National Park to Qeparo (where there’s a free afternoon on the beach), Himarë and Dhërmi. There’s a supporting minibus should the riding get too much, and e-bikes are available. The seven-night trip costs from £1,039 with departures from April to June, and September and October. explore.co.uk

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