Gjirokastër Fortress

The long stone hull of Gjirokastër Fortress rides the crest of a ridge above one of the best-preserved Ottoman towns in the Balkans, with the Drino valley spread out below. Its walls date back at least to the twelfth century, and over the following centuries the stronghold passed between the Byzantine Empire, the Despotate of Epirus, the Albanian Zenebishi family and the Ottomans. After 1812 the powerful regional ruler Ali Pasha of Tepelena rebuilt and enlarged it, adding a western extension and a clock tower that still marks the skyline.

The fortress also carries a harsher twentieth-century history. In 1932 the government of King Zog expanded its prison, and under the communist regime it held political prisoners. Today the vaulted galleries house a military museum with captured artillery, and a United States Air Force aircraft that came down in Albania during the Cold War stands on the ramparts. Inside the walls are towers, a cistern and an open-air stage used for Albania's National Folk Festival, a gathering of traditional polyphonic song and costume held here periodically.

Gjirokastër itself climbs the slopes beneath the castle in tiers of tall, fortified stone houses with slate-covered roofs, built mostly by landowning families in the Ottoman period. The old town is protected by UNESCO together with Berat as the Historic Centres of Berat and Gjirokastra, a rare surviving example of an Ottoman-era town shaped by a land-owning elite. The novelist Ismail Kadare was born here and set some of his best-known fiction in its steep lanes.

Getting there

The fortress overlooks the centre of Gjirokastër, about 0.3 km away. The closest airport in a straight line, Corfu (CFU), is about 56 km away but lies across the Greek border and the sea; within Albania, Tirana International Airport Nënë Tereza (TIA) is about 153 km away.