Aboard a hydrofoil from Corfu for a few hours back in Albania. This is the small coastal city of Sarandë.
Why a photo of a Nescafé sign?
Because twenty-five years ago I took a picture from near the same spot. Then, in a hellhole of a country, signs (even ones carved into hillsides) praised Hoxha and the party. Now global brands are inescapable and Sarandë has more tacky architecture than Hoxha had soporific speeches.
Children play (or at least they do in warmer weather) where desperate Albanians once considered swimming to Corfu. Most drowned, were shot or captured and dispatched, with their families, to appalling labour camps.
I’ve come, not just for old times sake, but to revisit an archaeological treasure.
To reach it, we drive through the moody and melancholy Albanian countryside, if not soaked in blood then permeated with its memory …
… and arrive where I had watched the same crude, cable ferry cross to the other side of the channel and its 13th Century castle. At least it now has handrails of a sort.
We walk past a Venetian watchtower …
… and I am back in Butrint, a little known Balkan gem. This is not the time to adequately describe a site that, at least in legend, is linked with Trojan exiles, was certainly Greek, then Roman, and embroiled in the wars of Byzantium, Venice and the Ottoman Empire.
Over the millennia it was an acropolis, a small city, then citadel, but, by the 1800s, reduced to a fishing village.
That was when the English writer and painter Edward Lear came. In his landscape, Butrint is the low hill just on the far side of the channel where the ferry now crosses.
The xenophobic and ultra chauvinistic Enver Hoxha recognized Butrint’s value for reinforcing his warped view of Albania’s history, but, in truth, Butrint was poorly preserved. When I first came, the area was mostly overgrown.
We had to find our way through brush to reach this early basilica, built in the 6th Century.
The early church is a magical place ...
and, for few minutes, I linger alone.
My reverie is broken when I remember Hoxha brought Khrushchev here in 1959. Hoxha later wrote (who knows if truthfully) that Khrushchev wasn’t particularly intrigued by the archaeological finds, far more interested in establishing a submarine base on Albania's coast.
So, these lovely glades saw the Soviet leader, who, for all his faults, denounced Stalin and released many of Stalin’s prisoners, and the Albanian despot who honoured Stalin, imprisoned a country and sent so many to their deaths. No sign tells visitors that the two were here. I understand why; Albanians are defensive about their recent past. But modern history is just as compelling as the ancient.
I wander down to the water to watch a fisherman peacefully adrift on the Vivar Channel. Albania has changed and only for the better. The transition has been difficult and it remains the most backward part of Europe. But surely nothing could be worse than the place I first saw decades ago.
Time to leave.
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If you arrived at my Albania visit directly from the first post in this Mediterranean series, I hope you’ll return to the start:
