Historic Centres of Berat and Gjirokastra

An 800-meter secret bunker with 59 rooms sits under Gjirokastra, built in such secrecy during the 1970s that most residents of the city had no idea it existed until the regime collapsed in the early 1990s. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s paranoid communist dictator for four decades, was born in this town in 1908, and the bunker is one of the stranger pieces of leftover infrastructure from that legacy. It sits alongside Ottoman-era stone houses that are the actual reason UNESCO listed the town, and the contrast between the two eras, feudal Ottoman merchant architecture and Cold War-era concrete paranoia, is something almost no standard guide mentions but is arguably the most interesting thing about walking Gjirokastra’s streets today.

Berat and Gjirokastra were jointly inscribed as a single UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2008, recognized for representing rare, well-preserved examples of Ottoman-period urban architecture where different religious communities built and lived side by side for centuries. Berat in particular earned its reputation as a place of religious coexistence, with mosques, Orthodox churches, and a former synagogue all within walking distance of each other inside a relatively compact old town.

Berat’s history runs deeper than most visitors assume, over 2,400 years, starting with fortification by the Illyrian Parthini tribe in the 4th century BCE. Romans, Byzantines, Bulgarians, Normans, Venetians, and Ottomans all controlled the site at different points, and that succession left physical traces you can actually see layered into the castle walls today: Byzantine masonry patched with Ottoman additions, all wrapped inside fortification stretching over a kilometer, with walls up to five meters thick in places. The town’s nickname, City of a Thousand Windows, comes from the tightly packed white Ottoman houses of the Mangalem quarter, stacked up the hillside with rows of windows facing the Osum River below. Across the water sits Gorica, the so-called Black City, quieter and less visited, connected to Mangalem by a stone bridge and worth the walk if only to look back at Mangalem from a distance, which is genuinely the best photograph in town and one almost nobody bothers to take because it requires crossing the river rather than staying on the postcard side.

Inside Berat Castle, still an inhabited residential area rather than a museum ruin, the Onufri Museum occupies the Church of the Dormition of Saint Mary and holds icons by Onufri, a 16th century Albanian painter whose distinctive, almost luminous use of red pigment set him apart from contemporaneous Byzantine iconographers elsewhere in the region. If you only visit one museum interior in Berat, make it this one rather than the more generically named ethnographic collections scattered through town.

Gjirokastra’s fortress tells a more militarized story. Originally built in the 12th century to control the valley route below, it was massively expanded after 1811 when the regional strongman Ali Pasha of Tepelena seized the town and rebuilt the citadel into the ship-shaped fortress that dominates the skyline today, with towers approaching 30 meters and walls over three meters thick in sections. Ali Pasha also commissioned an aqueduct stretching nearly eight miles to supply the fortress with fresh water, an engineering feat that gets far less attention than the castle itself despite being arguably more impressive given the terrain. Today the fortress houses an arms and weapons museum, not a working university as some tourist material incorrectly claims, and the grounds include a captured American aircraft from the Cold War era, a strange but genuine artifact of Albania’s decades of isolation. As of recent seasons, entry runs around 400 Lek for the fortress with an additional 200 Lek for the museum sections, and it is open daily except Mondays, generally 9am to 4pm, though hours shift seasonally so confirm locally before planning a visit around it. Visitor numbers have been climbing fast, with the citadel logging over 260,000 visitors in a recent year, so early morning arrival genuinely matters here if you want the fortress without a crowd.

The distinctive stone architecture that gives Gjirokastra its “City of Stone” nickname comes from the grey stone lower floors and white-plastered upper floors typical of the old town’s tall, narrow houses, built to withstand both defense needs and the mountainous terrain. Several of these historic residences, including well-preserved merchant houses in the bazaar area, are open to visitors and give a far more intimate sense of Ottoman-era domestic life than the fortress does.

Spring and early autumn are the sensible windows for both towns, when temperatures are manageable and the cobbled hillside streets are not baking under midsummer sun. Both towns are steep and best explored on foot, but the gradient is real; comfortable shoes matter more here than in almost any other Balkan old town, and a walking stick is not a bad idea if steep inclines bother your knees. If you want cultural events tied to a specific date, Gjirokastra has hosted AniFestA-GJIRO, an international youth and animation film festival, in late September and early October in recent years, giving the old town an added layer of activity outside the main summer crush without the overcrowding of peak season.