Butrint is one of those visits that leaves you speechless: an entire ancient city, hidden among woods and lagoons in the far south of Albania, where a single walk takes you across twenty-six centuries of history. Greeks, Romans, early Christians, Byzantines, Venetians and Ottomans all left their temples, theatres, baths, churches and fortresses here, one on top of another, in a site so complete and well preserved that UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1992.
What makes Butrint unique isn't just the quality of its ruins (a perfect Greek theatre, an early Christian baptistery with one of the most important mosaics in the Mediterranean, Cyclopean walls, the enigmatic Lion Gate) but also its setting. The dead city is wrapped in a national park of wetlands, channels and Mediterranean woodland full of birds and tortoises, with water always close by. The poet Virgil immortalised it in the Aeneid as a 'little Troy' founded by Trojan exiles.
This guide takes a practical look at Butrint: what to see inside the park and in what order, how to get there cheaply by bus from Sarandë or Ksamil, when to go to avoid the heat and the mosquitoes, how much admission costs, and how to combine it with the beaches of Ksamil or a day trip from Corfu. Without exaggerating, it's one of the most impressive and least crowded archaeological sites in Europe.
Founded around the 7th century BC as Bouthroton by the Chaonians of Greek Epirus, and home to a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius, Butrint became a Roman colony at Julius Caesar's wish. It flourished as a Byzantine city with a bishopric and magnificent mosaics, came under Venice in 1386, and finally passed to Ali Pasha before it was abandoned for good. Virgil turned it into myth by making it, in the Aeneid, a 'Troy in miniature' founded by the Trojans Helenus and Andromache. It was rediscovered and excavated by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Maria Ugolini in the 1920s and 1930s, and today it is a World Heritage Site. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Albania's Ionian coast: Greco-Roman ruins at Butrint, the ancient land of Epirus, Greek-speaking villages and coves that are now the country's top tourist destination.
Read the history of The Riviera and the south (Sarandë, Ksamil, Butrint) →They depart from Corfu, 16 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few ancient cities are born wrapped in as much myth as Butrint. The Roman poet Virgil immortalised it in the Aeneid by making it a 'little Troy': in the story, the Trojan hero Aeneas, who fled after the fall of Troy, lands here and finds Helenus and Andromache, Hector's widow, ruling over a city that reproduces the lost Troy in miniature, with its own Scaean Gate and its own river Simois. That literary link gave Butrint enormous prestige in the Roman world, which saw it as a living relic of Rome's Trojan origins.
Behind the myth lies a real history that is just as fascinating. The city was founded by the Chaonians, a tribe of Epirus with a Greek culture, around the 7th century BC, under the name Bouthroton. Its position was ideal: an easily defended peninsula surrounded by water, with a natural harbour and a lagoon teeming with fish, on the sea route between Greece and Italy and facing the island of Corfu. It soon became an important centre and the home of a famous sanctuary dedicated to Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing.
That sanctuary drove Butrint's prosperity. Pilgrims from across the region came looking for a cure, and their offerings made the city rich. In the 4th and 3rd centuries BC it built its circuit of walls from huge blocks, the Hellenistic theatre beside the sanctuary and many public buildings. The inscriptions carved into the theatre walls, which record the freeing of slaves, are now an extremely valuable source on social life in ancient Butrint.
Rome's reach extended to Butrint in the 2nd century BC, when Epirus came under Roman control. The city kept its importance, and in the 1st century BC its fortunes became tied to the great names of the Republic. The scholar Titus Pomponius Atticus, a friend of Cicero, owned large estates here, and the letters between the two men mention Butrint's affairs. After his campaigns, Julius Caesar arranged for veterans and colonists to settle here, and the city was refounded as a Roman colony. Emperor Augustus confirmed and strengthened that status after his victory at the nearby Battle of Actium (31 BC), the turning point that gave birth to the Empire.
Under Rome, Butrint enjoyed a golden age. The city gained a forum, baths with mosaics, an aqueduct that brought water from the mainland across the lagoon, nymphaea, luxurious villas and an enlarged theatre. It grew beyond the peninsula onto the neighbouring plain and became a thriving trading port on the Adriatic and Ionian seas. Some of the site's most famous sculptures date from this period, including the so-called 'Goddess of Butrint', a strikingly beautiful marble head now kept in the museum in Tirana.
Water, always present, was both Butrint's wealth and its threat. The same lagoons that fed it with fish also brought floods and a rising water table. Over the centuries, the city had to adapt again and again to a changing landscape, raising its buildings and strengthening its defences against the water.
With the Christianisation of the Empire and its split into East and West, Butrint became part of the Byzantine world and the seat of a bishop. Some of its most admired monuments date from this period, mainly the 5th and 6th centuries AD. One is the Great Baptistery, a circular building with a magnificent mosaic floor that ranks among the largest and most beautiful of early Christianity, filled with birds, fish and plant motifs rich in symbolism. Another is a large early Christian basilica built beside the city walls.
Byzantine Butrint was a fortified frontier town, fought over and battered by the upheavals of the Empire: barbarian raids, earthquakes, epidemics and the slow advance of water over its low-lying districts. Even so, it remained a strategic stronghold and a religious centre for centuries. The walls were reinforced again and again, with Byzantine masonry laid over Roman and Greek work. That stacking of eras is what makes the site so unusual today.
In the late Middle Ages, the city passed back and forth between the Byzantines, the Normans of southern Italy, the Despotate of Epirus, the Angevins of Naples and other powers competing for control of the Corfu Strait. Each of them left its mark on the defences and the street plan of a Butrint that kept shrinking, pulling back onto its acropolis as water and malaria took over the lowlands.
In 1386 the Republic of Venice bought Butrint along with Corfu, adding the city and its lagoon to its maritime empire. For the Venetians, Butrint mattered mainly for its defensive position facing Corfu and for its rich fishery: the lagoons produced mussels, eels and fish that supplied the nearby island. Venice built a castle on the old acropolis, the same one that houses the museum today. It strengthened the defences and built a tower beside the Vivari Channel to watch the passage and protect the valuable fishing grounds. But the city, worn down by malaria and flooding, was by then little more than a fortified outpost with a dwindling population.
After centuries of Venetian rule, and a brief spell under France and other powers during the Napoleonic Wars, the area fell in the early 19th century to Ali Pasha of Tepelena. This shrewd and ruthless, semi-independent Ottoman governor ruled southern Albania and north-western Greece from his court in Ioannina. Ali Pasha had a small triangular fortress built at the mouth of the Vivari Channel to control access and fishing, and it still stands today. It was the last chapter of Butrint's military life. After Ali Pasha's fall in 1822, the city was abandoned for good, swallowed by forest, reeds and lagoons, and forgotten for a century.
For generations, Butrint was little more than a place name and a heap of overgrown ruins known only to local fishermen. Virgil's 'little Troy' lay asleep under the undergrowth, waiting to be rediscovered.
Butrint's revival began in the 1920s, when the Italian archaeologist Luigi Maria Ugolini arrived at the head of a mission sent by Mussolini's Italy, which was looking around the Mediterranean for the 'Roman' roots of its imperialism. Between 1928 and his death in 1936, Ugolini uncovered the theatre, the sanctuary of Asclepius, the walls, the Lion Gate and much of the ancient city. He also brought to light remarkable sculptures such as the 'Goddess of Butrint'. Although those excavations carried a heavy political charge, Ugolini's work revealed the site's extraordinary richness to the world.
After the Second World War, under Enver Hoxha's communist regime, Albanian archaeologists continued the excavations, and Butrint was presented as a symbol of the nation's ancient past. When communism fell in the 1990s and the country opened up, the site was left exposed to looting and neglect amid the chaos, but it also drew international attention. The creation of the Butrint Foundation, with British support, and its work with the Albanian state made possible new, rigorous campaigns of excavation and conservation.
In 1992 UNESCO added Butrint to the World Heritage List, recognising its outstanding value as a record of successive Mediterranean civilisations. Protection was later extended to the natural surroundings, an internationally important wetland (a Ramsar site) full of birds, turtles and biodiversity. Today Butrint is both an archaeological park and a national park: a dead city twenty-six centuries old wrapped in a living forest, and one of the great treasures of Albania and of the whole Mediterranean. In a single afternoon you can walk in the footsteps of Greeks, Romans, Christians, Byzantines, Venetians and Ottomans.
