After saying farewell to the spectacular Accursed Mountains we spent a further six days in Albania. The other tourist highlights of Albania are mostly concentrated in the southern coast, which apparently has spectacular beaches, more rugged mountains and sprawling towns full of highrise hotels geared towards mass tourism.
Seeing as it was now July and really starting to get to the pointy end of the busy season, seeing as we'd found the Montenegrin Riviera pretty uninspiring despite it's lovely natural surroundings and finally, seeing as it's a minimum eight hour bus trip to get there from our starting point in Shkoder, we decided to skip this area and concentrate our time in the centre and north of the country.
This was both good and bad. With two exceptions there really wasn't anything particularly remarkable to see or do in this part of the country. But it was nice to slow down the pace a bit and see the parts of Albania that were still only lightly affected by foreign tourism.
Berat is probably Albania's biggest destination for foreign visitors outside the northeastern mountains and the south coast. It's a decent sized town with a pretty impressive old castle up on a hilltop far above. We enjoyed the walk around the fortress, especially because, unlike so many other fortified old towns we'd visited, it's still almost entirely filled with the residences of local people. We had dinner at one of the few small restaurants near the entrance and climbed up on the walls to watch the sunset in one direction and the resident kids playing football inside the walls in the other.
Down below are two lovely old neighbourhoods, one Christian and one Muslim draped on the hillsides of either side of the river.
Ever since we arrived in the country I'd been surprised by how many Christians (both Catholic and Orthodox) there were. I'd always assumed the country was almost entirely Muslim. On census forms about 75% of the population are followers of Islam. In actual fact, most of the country is pretty secular and for most people their religion is as much cultural as spiritual. It's interesting that there seems to be much less animosity between the religions in Albania than anywhere else in the Balkans. Instead the big thing there is nationalism, language and ethnicity. The key thing isn't what religion you are, it's that you are Albanian. Sarah read somewhere that the national religion of Albania is "being Albanian," and I can see exactly what they mean.
This was particularly obvious when we headed back north past Tirana (again) to the small city of Kruje. Kruje was the site of Albanian national hero Skanderbeg's redoubt, from where he led the resistance to the Ottoman invaders in the 15th century. There's an interesting contrast here to almost every other Muslim majority country. In Morocco (for example) the people who brought Islam to the country are revered heroes and saints. In Albania, the leader who fiercely resisted the bringers of the new religion is the national icon.
Skanderbeg's fortress was only modestly interesting (and much what remains today is actually Ottoman) but the views from our accommodation at the high point of the castle were great. The castle looks out over Tirana, the Adriatic and mountain passes that lead to the inland plain that the capital sits in make it supremely obvious why this was such a great spot for a castle.
Also fun was visiting the 1982 Skanderbeg museum. It was mostly signed in Albanian (which is actually distantly related to English, but only very distantly, being one of the earliest to split from their common Indo-European ancestor). And lots of the artifacts were reproductions or modern things such as statues and paintings. But seeing how people view their national icons is often an interesting way of looking into their culture.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Tirana we spent a night in the small city of Elbasan. Elbasan has pretty much zero points of tourist interest. There were a couple of old castle walls that might have been cool had we not been thoroughly castled beforehand. But really the best thing about Elbasan was that the place we stayed was right in the middle of a very residential, infrequently visited Albanian neighbourhood. So we spent a good while sitting in the garden relaxing in verdant splendour and eating watermelon (in the southern Balkans it was watermelon season, and I think from that point on we probably ate roughly 0.6 watermelons a day).
In addition to watermelon, as we were preparing to depart Elbasan we treated ourselves to a Bugaçe. An Elbasan breakfast speciality, it's pretty much a flatbread (kind of like a paratha) fried in butter, smeared with cheese, covered in spicy salt and stuffed inside a bun. The lady asked if we wanted a whole or a half one. At this point I had no idea what we were in for and ordered a whole. Yummy, but boy it was a lot. We didn't finish it 'til dinner that evening.
After passing through Tirana twice we returned to the capital for an actual visit as our final stop in Albania. There are a few points of interest in Tirana. The most famous one is its bunkers. These are actually scatterered all over the country in their thousands, but unsurprisingly Tirana is where they're at their densest. During it's communist period, Albania first aligned itself with Stalin, then after he proved inadequately zealous, with Mao, then finally gave up on the entire world becoming an isolated dictatorship with no allies to speak of. Albania's dictator, Enver Hoxha, was so paranoid about foreign invasion that he had thousands of little concrete bunkers built all over the country. Apparently the engineer who designed them proved their efficacy by sitting inside one while it was bombarded by a tank. This very resilience of course maybe makes them very difficult to remove, so they remain. Some have been converted to art galleries or storage spaces or mini-museums, but most just sit as nature slowly, slowly takes them back.
The other big item on our agenda was the national museum. It was actually a pretty good one. The early history of the area was fun to learn about (the Albanians claim descent from the Illyrians, infamous pirates and home of Pyrrhus, who gave Rome a good scare in the days of the Republic, only sent packing after his Pyrrhic Victory). And of course there was a big Skanderbeg section (made a bit redundant by the museum we'd already been to in Kruje). But the very best bits were the Orthodox Church icons (dozens of gilded gems of medieval religious art) and the section on the period of the dictatorship, which sadly we only barely scratched the surface of, as it was quite story focussed and all of the stories were in Albanian. I particularly liked the fact that relatively few of the exhibits were behind glass or otherwise restricted, and visitors were trusted to look as closely as they liked (a real treat with the icons!) and behave sensibly.
Outside of the big tourist draws, Tirana was just a very surprisingly pleasant city. If you'd asked me to guess, I would have expected that it would remain perhaps the greyest and grimmest of the former eastern European communist capitals. But actually, more than any other I've been to, its replaced, demolished and renovated its architecture from that era. Around the few square kilometres at the centre at least, you almost never see obvious memories of the time unless you go looking for them.
We went to a brewery with a huge (bunkerlike!) underground beer hall. They only had one of their four beers available when we visited, a Helles that had obviously been contaminated with the yeast from their hefeweizen, but it was actually really good for all that.
We spent a fair while at our comfy hostel, much of it talking to an Okinawan born-again Christian who had, for very unclear reasons, spent eight months in Tirana. If this sounds unpleasant, it actually was, kind of surprisingly, not. He mostly asked questions and seemed genuinely interested in the answers and not in doing any conversion (he seemed truly gobsmacked that neither Sarah nor I have any desire to have children, and disappointed that I'd never had any sort of supernatural experience).
And finally, we didn't spend long enough in cafes. These are probably the very best thing about Tirana. Not only are there tons of them (we're talking North African densities) but they're almost all modern and welcoming, with a mix of male and female patrons. And serve some of the most reliably good coffee in the Balkans, if not all of Europe.
We were torn as to whether we should depart Tirana (and Albania) super early and have some time in our next destination that day, or leave in the afternoon and arrive at night. We eventually chose the former and had a very smooth and pleasant trip up to the border of Kosovo. I don't think the Albanian authorities even looked at our passports, so we said farewell, leaving Albania with no physical proof that we'd actually ever been in it.
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