Gjirokastra is Albania's 'stone city': an Ottoman ensemble of tower houses perched on a mountainside, with grey slate roofs that look like fish scales when seen from above. A Unesco World Heritage Site, it is one of the best-preserved examples of Balkan Ottoman architecture, with its fortified mansions, steep cobbled streets and a huge castle overlooking the Drino river valley.
The town also carries a heavy 20th-century history: it was the birthplace of Enver Hoxha, the dictator who ruled Albania for more than four decades, and of the writer Ismail Kadaré, the best-known Albanian in the world, who immortalised it in his novels. In the castle, a Cold War bunker-tunnel and an arms exhibition recall that past of isolation and fear, which this guide treats with the sobriety it deserves.
We'll cover what to see in Gjirokastra in one or two days —the castle and its tunnel, Ottoman house-museums such as Zekate and Skenduli, the old bazaar—, how much admission costs, how to get there from Tirana or Sarandë and how to combine it with the Blue Eye and the Riviera. A stone city where the beauty of Ottoman architecture and the memory of the 20th century go hand in hand.
Gjirokastra has ancient origins —there was a fortified settlement here in Antiquity— but its castle and its fame date from the Middle Ages and, above all, from the Ottoman period. Already mentioned in the 13th century, it grew under Ottoman rule from the 15th century as a town of stone tower houses and a bazaar, and in the 19th century it was a centre of the Albanian national awakening. In the 20th century it saw the birth of the dictator Enver Hoxha and the writer Ismail Kadaré, and lived through the harshness of the communist regime. Its exceptional stone architecture earned it Unesco recognition. We cover it in detail on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Two World Heritage stone towns and ancient Apollonia: the Ottoman and classical heart of Albania, among Byzantine icons and fortified tower houses.
Read the history of The historic south (Berat, Gjirokastra) →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. There are not many in Gjirokastra, but the ones there are worth it. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Tap the cards below and have a look.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Gjirokastra area has been inhabited since antiquity. The nearby hills hold the remains of Antigone, a city founded in the Hellenistic period, and fortified settlements took advantage of the strategic position of the Drino river valley, a natural corridor between inland Epirus and the Ionian coast. The mountain where the castle stands today was a first-rate defensive site, which is why it was fortified very early on.
The medieval town itself appears in the sources from the 12th and 13th centuries. Its name, Gjirokastër, has been linked to the Greek 'Argyrokastron', usually translated as 'silver castle' or 'silvery castle', although the exact etymology is debated. In 1417, after a period under local lords and within the orbit of the region's despotates, Gjirokastra passed to the Ottoman Empire, which made it the administrative centre of the area. The castle was enlarged and strengthened over the centuries until it became one of the largest in the Balkans.
Under Ottoman rule, the town grew on the slope below the fortress, with its neighbourhoods of stone houses arranged around the bazaar. The combination of an imposing castle and a town of defensive tower houses reflects the nature of the region: mountain country, a land of clans, and a culture in which the fortified house was not only a home but also a status symbol and a refuge. That imprint still shapes the look of Gjirokastra today.
It was during the Ottoman period, and above all between the 17th and 19th centuries, that Gjirokastra took on its characteristic form as a 'stone city'. Wealthy families (merchants, Ottoman officials, landowners) built large multi-storey stone tower houses with thick walls and few windows on the lower floors for defence. Higher up were spacious reception rooms richly decorated with frescoes, carved wood and fireplaces. The roofs, covered in grey stone slabs, give the town its unmistakable scaled look when seen from the castle.
The town prospered as the commercial and administrative centre of southern Ottoman Albania. Its bazaar, where the main cobbled streets meet, was packed with craftsmen's workshops and shops, and the town was known for its production and trade. In the early 19th century, Gjirokastra came under the rule of Ali Pasha of Tepelena, the powerful and almost independent Ottoman governor of the region, who strengthened the castle and gave the town infrastructure such as the aqueduct.
Gjirokastra was also an important centre of culture and of the Albanian national awakening in the 19th century. Muslim and Orthodox communities lived side by side in the town and its region, and figures of the movement for the Albanian language and identity came from here. When Albania declared independence in 1912, Gjirokastra and the whole south ended up at the centre of border disputes with Greece, which claimed the region as Northern Epirus, a conflict that would shape the first decades of the 20th century.
The 20th century tied Gjirokastra to two of the most influential names in modern Albania, in two very different ways. Enver Hoxha was born in this stone town in 1908. He went on to rule Albania as its communist leader for more than four decades, from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1985. Being the dictator's birthplace gave Gjirokastra a special status under the regime, with investment and particular attention. It also left the town carrying the weight of a figure now associated with one of the most repressive systems in Europe.
Ismail Kadare was born in the same town in 1936. He is the best-known Albanian writer worldwide, a regular Nobel contender and the author of novels translated into dozens of languages. Kadare portrayed Gjirokastra in works such as 'Chronicle in Stone', where the town of grey houses, seen through a child's eyes during the war, becomes a character in its own right. His writing, produced under the dictatorship and full of allegory, is one of the great windows onto Albania's history and soul.
That the dictator and the great dissident writer were born in the same small stone town somehow sums up the tensions of Albania's 20th century. Today, Hoxha's birth house, rebuilt after a fire, holds the Ethnographic Museum, and the town approaches its most awkward son with the historical distance that decades bring. Kadare, on the other hand, is a source of local and national pride.
During the four decades of Enver Hoxha's communist regime (1944-1991), Gjirokastra lived, like the rest of Albania, under a one-party system, a planned economy and iron control of the population. Being the leader's home town earned it some attention, and in 1961 it was declared a 'museum city', which helped preserve its exceptional stone architecture from the modernisation that transformed other places. An arms museum was set up in the castle, and the remains of a plane presented as a US spy aircraft were put on display for propaganda purposes.
The regime's international isolation (it broke in turn with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and China) and its obsession with a possible invasion also left an underground mark on Gjirokastra. A large anti-aircraft and anti-nuclear tunnel bunker was secretly dug beneath the town to shelter the local Party and State authorities in the event of war. That maze of rooms, which you can visit today, is telling evidence of the fear and control that defined those years.
Political repression, surveillance by the secret police, the ban on religion decreed in 1967 and economic hardship were part of everyday life in Gjirokastra too, as in the rest of the country. Beneath its untouched beauty, the stone city keeps the memory of one of the harshest periods in Albanian history, and its museums and tunnel help visitors understand it today and keep it from being forgotten.
After the fall of communism in 1991, Gjirokastra went through the difficult nineties like the rest of the country. Those years included the serious unrest of 1997 after the collapse of the pyramid schemes, which hit southern Albania especially hard. Once that period was over, the stone city began to be recognised for its heritage value. In 2005, UNESCO added its historic centre to the World Heritage List, and in 2008 the listing was extended to include Berat as well, as outstanding examples of a well-preserved Ottoman town.
Today, Gjirokastra lives largely from cultural tourism. Travellers climb up to the great castle, walk through the Cold War tunnel, visit magnificent tower houses such as the Zekate and the Skenduli, stroll through the old bazaar and take in the sea of stone roofs from above. Every few years the town also hosts the National Folklore Festival, one of the country's most important cultural events, which fills the castle with music and traditional costumes from all over Albania.
The quiet beauty of the stone city combined with the memory of its 20th century (birthplace of the dictator and of the great writer, the tunnel of fear, the Ottoman mansions) makes Gjirokastra an especially rich visit. It is also just a short trip from the Blue Eye and the southern Riviera, so it has become an almost essential stop on any trip through southern Albania. It is a place where the stone holds, layer after layer, the whole history of the country.
