Gjirokastra

Photo by Anthony Weir

Gjirokastra or GJIROKASTËR is one of the most venerable towns of Albania. Its name means Silver Fortress, and neatly shows the relation within one linguistic group of Greek, Latin, Etruscan and Albanian.Like Berat to the north, it is a UNESCO World Heritage City.

In the south of the country, 300 meters above sea level, Gjirokastra has a beautiful and dramatic situation in a lush valley between the high Gjerë mountains and the rushing river Drin or Drinos.

Photos by Anthony Weir

Note the ubiquitous Hoxha-bunkers built all over Albania at huge cost
following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1998.

It is dominated by an Ottoman fortress said to be the second largest in the Balkans, the largest being in Belgrade. Its important and commanding situation (guarding one of the main North-South routes of the Balkans) indicates that it must have been since prehistoric times the site of a fort or fortress. Crusaders passed by, looting and raping and pillaging, in the 11th century.

A charming recent legend recounts that when Ottomans invaded in the 14th century a Princess Argyro jumped from the highest tower of the castle of Gjirokastër with her very young son, to escape seizure by the Turks.

Photo by Anthony Weir

The old part of the town, with charming and characteristic Balkan-Ottoman houses, many with rooves composed of expertly-cut shale stone, surrounds the citadel and overlook the grim Communist-built slum-suburbs and the flood-plain of the Drin.

Photos by Anthony Weir

The old residential quarter under one of the many sudden rainstorms in the Drinos valley.

The old Ottoman houses do not have balconies, but they are richly endowed with well-proportioned windows. Many have elegant verandas. The narrow streets have very well-laid cobble-stones and square-sets. The corner-houses have windows which are vantage-points, as can be seen in the picture below.

One of the main streets (the former Bazaar) of the old town taken just after the Communist period.

Beyond the core of the town below the citadel, the houses are obviously residential - a few of them almost palatial. These date from the period in the middle of the 19th century when Albania was a wealthy part of the Ottoman Empire, to which the country supplied not only fearsome administrators such as the notorious Ali Pasha of Tepelena, but engineers and architects. Berat to the North has similar buildings also surrounding a citadel.

Gjirokastra (much of whose population spoke Greek, just as much of the population of Iannina in northwestern Greece spoke Albanian) played an important role in the early Albanian liberation movement. The Assembly of Gjirokastra was held in July 1880. Vlachs also were a significant minority in Southern Albania.

With the rest of Albania, Gjirokastër was occupied by Mussolini's forces in 1938, then by the Greeks after Italy's pathetic attack on Greece in 1940 - then by the Italians again, and finally by the Germans after the Italian surrender to the Allies. This period and earlier is covered by Ismail Kadare's Chronicle of Stone (which has been badly translated into English). Both Hoxha (whose name means mullah, and is pronounced 'hodja') and Kadare were born in the town.

Like Yugoslavia, Albania was liberated from the Germans by groups headed by a Communist guerrilla leader who quickly controlled the whole country. But Tito was a much more subtle and pragmatic leader than Hoxha - who was born in Gjirokastra, and whose name means 'mullah'. Hoxha quite quickly became paranoid (not least because Tito nearly succeeded in annexing Albania as a province of Yugoslavia) - to Albania's continuing cost.

View of the town from the citadel.
Photo by Anthony Weir

Under Comrade Enver Hoxha the Fortress of Gjirokastër with its 7 towers, remodelled by Ali Pasha of Tepelena in 1811-12 (now in some state of disrepair due to looting and vandalism), became not only a prison (the cells for political prisoners still to be seen at the top) but the scene of a biennial Folk Festival - last held in 1988. This attracted performers from neighboring countries, and musicologists from at least as far as Britain. Some fine recordings of this last festival survive in archives.

Under Hoxha the National Museum of Arms was established in the ground floor of the fortress. It was looted during the first wave of unrest in 1990. The remains of an ancient American spy-plane, shot down in the 1950s, are to be seen in the main yard of the monument.

Approaching Gjirokastra from the south (the only road runs north along the river valley) and about a kilometer from the lower town is a fine stone bridge over the Drin, built early in the Ottoman period.

Photo by Anthony Weir