Long before the word "Albania" existed, the western Balkans were home to the Illyrians, a group of Indo-European peoples whom most historians regard as the direct ancestors of modern Albanians. They occupied a vast territory stretching from Istria, in the northern Adriatic, down to Epirus in the south, and were organised into tribes such as the Labeates, the Ardiaei and the Taulantii.
In the 3rd century BC an Illyrian kingdom emerged, centred on Scodra (today's Shkodra). Its last king of any weight was Gentius, who reigned around 181-168 BC and ended up defeated and taken prisoner to Rome, marking Illyria's final absorption by the Roman Republic. Under Roman rule, the region became part of the province of Illyricum and later of Macedonia, and it was crossed by the Via Egnatia, the great road linking the Adriatic with Constantinople.
The theory of Illyrian-Albanian continuity — that Albanians descend from the Illyrians and that their language is the heir to ancient Illyrian — is the most widely accepted, but it is worth being honest: it is a hypothesis still debated by historians. Illyrian left few written records, and some linguists have proposed alternative origins for Albanian (Thracian or Daco-Moesian). What is not in dispute is that Albanian is a distinct, independent branch of the Indo-European languages, with no close living relatives.
From the 7th century BC, the Albanian coast saw Greek colonisation. Settlers from Corinth and Corcyra (today's Corfu) founded the city of Epidamnos around 627 BC, which Rome would later rename Dyrrachium to avoid the echo of the Latin word damnum, "loss": it is today's Durrës. A little further south, around 600 BC, Corinthians and Corcyraeans founded Apollonia, which became home to a renowned school of philosophy and rhetoric where the young Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, studied.
Further south still, beside a channel connecting a lake with the Ionian Sea, lay Butrint (Bouthroton), a Greek colony and later a Roman city. Legend, recorded by Virgil in the Aeneid, linked it to exiled Trojans; archaeology, more prosaically, reveals a prosperous port with a theatre, baths and early Christian basilicas.
Under Rome, this strip was far more than a backwater. The Via Egnatia began at Dyrrachium and Apollonia and crossed the Balkans to Thessaloniki and Byzantium, turning the Albanian ports into the western gateway of the road to the East. During the Roman civil wars, Caesar and Pompey clashed precisely here, in the Dyrrachium campaign of 48 BC. Apollonia, Butrint and the amphitheatre of Durrës are today three of the country's largest archaeological sites.
When the Roman Empire split in 395 AD, Albanian territory ended up on the eastern side, under Constantinople. For almost a thousand years it was a frontier land of the Byzantine Empire, fought over, invaded and resettled again and again by Goths, Avars, Slavs, Bulgarians, Normans and the Italian maritime republics.
Christianity had taken root early on the coast, and the region ended up split by a fault line that would shape its history: the north gravitated towards Rome and the Latin rite, while the south followed Constantinople and Orthodoxy. That double religious allegiance — Catholic in the north, Orthodox in the south — predates the arrival of Islam by centuries and helps explain the country's extraordinary religious diversity.
The name "Albania" and the term "Albanians" only appear clearly documented in the 11th century, when Byzantine chroniclers mention the Albanoi of the Krujë area. It was also in the Middle Ages that local feudal principalities began to take shape, semi-autonomous from an increasingly weak Byzantine power, and these would form the country's political base on the eve of the Ottoman storm.
In the 15th century, the Ottoman advance across the Balkans met its most stubborn opponent in Albania. The central figure was Gjergj Kastrioti (c. 1405-1468), known as Skanderbeg. The son of an Albanian nobleman, he had been handed over as a child hostage to the Ottoman court, trained as a soldier and converted to Islam. In 1443 he deserted, returned to his homeland, took up the Christian faith again and led the rebellion.
In 1444 he united the Albanian princes in the League of Lezhë and for some twenty-five years waged a war of attrition against two sultans, Murad II and Mehmed II, the same sultan who conquered Constantinople. His base was the fortress of Krujë, which withstood several massive sieges with tiny garrisons thanks to the mountainous terrain and guerrilla tactics: ambushes, quick raids and retreats. The papacy hailed him as the "athlete of Christ".
Skanderbeg died of fever in 1468 and, without his leadership, the resistance crumbled: Krujë fell in 1478 and the country came under Ottoman rule. But he became the great Albanian national symbol, claimed both by the 19th-century national awakening and, later, by the communist regime. It is worth not confusing the myth with the man: he was a real and effective leader, not the unifier of a nation that did not yet exist as such.
Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire for more than four centuries, from the late 15th century until 1912. It was the period that most shaped the country's human landscape. Unlike most of the Balkans, a large share of the population here converted to Islam during the 16th and 17th centuries, through a mix of tax incentives, social mobility and sustained pressure. The result was a Muslim-majority society with Catholic (in the north) and Orthodox (in the south) minorities, a religious mosaic that remains one of the country's defining features.
The Ottomans organised the territory into provinces and left a visible architectural mark: the bazaars, mosques and terraced stone old towns of cities such as Berat, Gjirokastra and Krujë. Many Albanians built careers within the empire, some rising as high as grand vizier; the dynasty that ruled Egypt from the early 19th century, that of Muhammad Ali, was of Albanian origin.
That integration came at a cost: it delayed the formation of a modern national consciousness. While Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians were building states during the 19th century, Albanians, split among three religions and without a national church to unify the language, took longer to see themselves as a nation. That delay would weigh enormously in 1912.
The cultural and political movement known as Rilindja (the Albanian "Renaissance") gathered strength in the second half of the 19th century. Its intellectuals worked on something as basic as establishing a single alphabet for writing Albanian — achieved at the Congress of Manastir in 1908 — and on fostering the idea of a nation above religious divisions. An early milestone was the League of Prizren in 1878, formed to defend Albanian-populated lands as the great powers carved up the Balkans.
The outcome came with the Balkan Wars. As the Serbian, Greek and Montenegrin armies advanced on Ottoman territory and threatened to divide it among themselves, Ismail Qemali proclaimed Albania's independence in Vlorë on 28 November 1912. The powers recognised an Albanian state at the London Conference of 1913, but drew its borders leaving out roughly half of the region's Albanian population, above all in Kosovo, a wound that remains open.
The young state was born fragile and unstable. A German prince, William of Wied, was brought in to reign in 1914 and lasted barely six months. The First World War turned the country into a battlefield for foreign armies, and only in the 1920s did Albania achieve some institutional consolidation.
Out of the instability of the 1920s emerged Ahmet Zogu, a clan chief from central Albania who became first prime minister, then president (1925) and finally proclaimed himself king as Zog I in 1928. His reign modernised the state timidly, but relied more and more on the money and weapons of Mussolini's fascist Italy, which gradually turned Albania into a de facto protectorate.
On 7 April 1939, Italy invaded the country outright. Within a few days resistance was crushed, Zog fled into exile and Albania was absorbed into the Italian empire in personal union with the crown of Victor Emmanuel III. After the Italian surrender in 1943, the occupation passed to Nazi Germany until late 1944.
The occupation gave rise to a partisan resistance in which several factions competed. The communist one, led by Enver Hoxha and organised as the National Liberation Front, prevailed over the others thanks to its discipline and foreign backing. In November 1944, when the Germans withdrew, the communist partisans controlled the country. Albania was one of the few European states liberated without the Soviet Red Army setting foot on its soil, a fact Hoxha would later use to justify his independence from Moscow.
Between 1944 and 1985, Enver Hoxha ruled Albania as one of the most closed and repressive dictatorships of the 20th century. His regime was defined by strict loyalty to Stalinism, which he maintained even as the Soviet Union itself abandoned it. That orthodoxy led to a series of breaks: with Tito's Yugoslavia in 1948, with Khrushchev's USSR in 1961 — which he accused of betraying Marxism — and finally with China, his former ally, in 1978. By the end, Albania stood alone, without allies and practically cut off from the rest of the world.
Isolation was state policy. Leaving the country was forbidden, private car ownership was almost non-existent and contact with foreigners could land you in prison. Repression relied on the political police, the Sigurimi, on a wide network of labour and internment camps and on neighbours watching neighbours. Thousands of people were executed or died in prison for political reasons, and entire families were punished for a relative's "crime".
Two features made this regime notorious. First, its defensive obsession: convinced an invasion was imminent, Hoxha ordered hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers built across the whole country — the most frequently cited estimates put the figure at over 170,000 — and they still dot fields and beaches today. Second, state atheism: in 1967 Albania officially declared itself the world's first atheist country, banned all religious practice and closed, demolished or repurposed its more than two thousand places of worship, mosques and churches. It is a hard story, better told with facts and restraint than with adjectives.
Enver Hoxha died in 1985 and was succeeded by Ramiz Alia, who attempted a cautious thaw without dismantling the system. But the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 made Europe's last Stalinist regime unsustainable. In December 1990, student protests at the University of Tirana opened the door to the end of the communist monopoly and the legalisation of opposition parties.
The first multi-party elections were held in 1991, and a second round in 1992 brought Sali Berisha's Democratic Party to power, ending almost half a century of rule by the Party of Labour. In the midst of that process, the image that went around the world was the exodus: thousands of Albanians took to the sea and clambered aboard overcrowded ships bound for Italy, scenes that revealed to Europe the scale of the isolation and poverty the country had been left in.
Among the most symbolic moments were the toppling of Hoxha's statues and the reopening of places of worship. Religious freedom was restored, and today Albania is often cited as an example of coexistence between Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians, a paradoxical legacy for a country where religion was banned by decree for more than two decades.
The transition to capitalism had a traumatic chapter. In the mid-1990s, many Albanians poured their savings into pyramid investment schemes promising sky-high interest. It is estimated that the population invested around a billion dollars, a sum equivalent to roughly half the country's GDP. When those pyramids collapsed, between late 1996 and early 1997, millions of people lost everything.
Anger turned into insurrection. The state lost control, protesters raided military depots and seized hundreds of thousands of weapons, and the country slid into something close to civil war. Around 2,000 people are estimated to have died in the violence. Berisha's government fell, and a UN-authorised multinational force led by Italy had to be deployed to restore a minimum of order and allow new elections.
The 1997 collapse left a deep scar and a warning about the fragility of newborn institutions. Just a couple of years later, in 1999, Albania would again be at the centre of the regional crisis, taking in hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees fleeing the Kosovo war.
21st-century Albania has left isolation behind and bet on Western integration. It joined NATO in 2009 and that same year applied for membership of the European Union. It was granted candidate status in 2014 and, after years of waiting tied to European conditions, formal accession negotiations opened in July 2022. In 2024 the EU decoupled Albania's process from that of North Macedonia, to which it had been bound, and the country became one of the fastest-moving candidates, with the stated goal of wrapping up negotiations towards the end of the decade.
At the same time, tourism became a central economic driver. The Ionian Sea beaches — the Albanian Riviera, Ksamil, Sarandë —, the museum cities of Berat and Gjirokastra and the Alps in the north drew a wave of visitors that transformed entire towns. That opening also brought tensions familiar to any fast-developing country: mass emigration of young people, corruption, property pressure on the coast and the challenge of protecting its heritage.
Albania is still one of the poorest countries in Europe, but also one of those that has changed fastest. Its recent history — from bunker to beach resort, from compulsory atheism to religious coexistence, from total isolation to the European negotiating table — is one of the most striking transformations on the continent.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Shkodra is one of the oldest towns in Albania and one of the most steeped in history in the north. Founded by the Illyrian tribe of the Labeates around the 4th century BC under the name Scodra, it was the capital of the Illyrian kingdom under King Gentius, the last Illyrian monarch, defeated by Rome in 168 BC. Its Rozafa Castle, between the Drin and Buna rivers, holds that thousand-year-old memory.
Rozafa is linked to one of the best-known legends in the Balkans: that of a woman, wife of the youngest of three builder brothers, who agrees to be walled up alive in the fortress foundations so that the walls will stop collapsing, asking only that they leave one breast free to nurse her son, one eye to see him and one hand to caress him. It is a myth of female sacrifice that appears, in different versions, all over south-eastern Europe.
Over the centuries, Shkodra was a trading centre, the seat of a semi-autonomous local power under the Ottomans (the Bushati pashas) and the cultural capital of the north. In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was a centre of Albanian Catholicism and of the intellectual activity of the national revival. Today it is the big city of the north and the gateway to the Albanian Alps.
Unlike the centre and the south, Albania's mountainous north kept a strong Roman Catholic presence throughout the Ottoman centuries, tied by rite and history to the nearby Dalmatian coast and to Rome. For centuries Shkodra was the heart of that Albanian Catholicism, with its churches, seminaries and religious orders.
This northern Catholicism suffered especially harsh persecution under the communist regime. When Albania declared itself an atheist state in 1967, the Catholic clergy were among the hardest hit: bishops and priests were executed or died in prison, and religious practice was banned outright. The Albanian Catholic Church recognises several of those clergy as martyrs of the regime.
These lands also produced the most universally known Albanian religious figure: Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, born in 1910 in Skopje (then Ottoman, now North Macedonia) into a Catholic family of Albanian origin, known to the world as Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Tirana airport bears her name. After 1991 the north recovered its Catholic life and its pilgrimages, another piece of Albania's religious mosaic.
For centuries the northern mountains were a world apart, hard for any empire to govern, ruled by their own customary law: the Kanun. The most famous is the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, a body of oral rules handed down from generation to generation and only written down in the early 20th century by the Franciscan friar Shtjefën Gjeçovi.
The Kanun governed every aspect of tribal life: family, property, marriage, hospitality and the settling of disputes. Two of its concepts are famous. One is the besa, a pledged word of honour, considered sacred and inviolable. The other is gjakmarrja, the blood feud: when a killing went unatoned, the wronged family had the right, under the code, to take the life of a man from the guilty family, which could set off chains of revenge lasting generations.
Under communism, the state harshly suppressed these practices and declared them extinct. However, after the collapse of order in the 1990s, some resurfaced in isolated areas of the north, with entire families confined to their homes to avoid revenge. It is a sensitive subject, often exaggerated or exoticised by the press: it is best treated for what it is, a historical legal tradition whose present-day manifestations are marginal and the focus of reconciliation efforts.
The Albanian Alps, also known as Bjeshkët e Nemuna, the "Accursed Mountains", are the range of limestone peaks Albania shares with Montenegro and Kosovo. It is the wildest and most spectacular region in the country, with glacial valleys, waterfalls and stone villages that, until a few decades ago, could only be reached on foot or on horseback.
Two valleys now draw most of the mountain tourism: Theth and Valbona. Theth, in the heart of the Alps, has a stone Catholic church and the famous kulla, a tower house that served as a refuge for men threatened by blood feud under the Kanun. Valbona, on the other side of the mountain, is a broad glacial valley ringed by imposing peaks. The trail linking the two valleys over the Valbona Pass has become one of the most popular hikes in south-eastern Europe.
For centuries these mountains were the territory of the northern tribes (fise), which kept almost total autonomy from the Ottomans. The geographical isolation that under communism condemned the region to neglect and poverty is now its main draw: nature that is almost untouched and a mountain culture that survived every attempt to subdue it.
Under communism, the north was one of the hardest-hit regions in the country. Its clan traditions, its Catholicism and its unruly character made it an object of suspicion for the regime, which kept it poor and under watch. Many of its people emigrated to Shkodra, Tirana or abroad, and several mountain villages were left almost empty.
After 1991, that isolation first got worse, with mass emigration and abandonment, but in the 21st century it turned into an unexpected opportunity. The boom in hiking and rural tourism made valleys like Theth and Valbona sought-after destinations, and many families turned their old stone houses into hostels and guesthouses.
This revival comes with its tensions: the arrival of roads, cars and visitors clashes with the fragility of the environment and with traditional ways of life. The building of hydroelectric dams on the rivers of the north, particularly around Valbona, sparked strong environmental protests. The north thus embodies the dilemma facing all of today's Albania: how to escape poverty and isolation without losing what makes it unique.
Butrint is the great archaeological site of southern Albania and one of the most complete in the Balkans. Set on a peninsula between a lake and the channel leading to the Ionian Sea, it was a Greek colony from the 7th–6th century BC, a Roman city from 30 BC under Augustus, an early Christian bishop's seat, a Byzantine stronghold and, finally, a Venetian possession.
Each era left its layer: the Greek theatre, the Roman forum, a large early Christian baptistery with mosaics, the Byzantine walls and a small Venetian castle. Legend, as told by Virgil in the Aeneid, credited its founding to Trojan refugees led by the seer Helenus, a mythical tale best kept separate from the documented history of the site.
Butrint was systematically excavated by an Italian archaeological mission in the 1930s and has been a National Park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992. Surrounded by wetlands and lagoons, it combines archaeological interest with a protected natural setting, which makes it one of the most visited places in the country.
In antiquity this whole southern strip was part of Epirus, the region straddling present-day Albania and Greece whose most famous king was Pyrrhus, known for his "Pyrrhic victories" against Rome in the 3rd century BC. It has been a cultural and linguistic borderland for millennia, where Greek and Illyrian-Albanian elements mix.
That borderland character has left a mark that lasts to this day: the region is home to an officially recognised Greek-speaking minority, present above all around Sarandë and in inland villages. The town of Himarë itself has a traditionally Orthodox, Greek-speaking community whose identity has been a source of disputes and sensitivities between Albania and Greece.
The border with Greece, very close by, was one of the most militarised and sealed in Europe under communism, studded with bunkers and watchtowers to stop Albanians from fleeing. Today it is an easy crossing used by tourists and workers, and many southern Albanians emigrated across it to Greece in the 1990s.
Sarandë, the main town on the Riviera, faces the Ionian Sea almost opposite the Greek island of Corfu, visible across the strait. Its name comes from an ancient monastery dedicated to the Forty Martyrs (Aghioi Saranda). For centuries it was a modest anchorage; under communism, a small fishing and military centre.
Himarë, further north on the same coast, is an old town clinging to the hillside, with a stone old quarter and a strong identity of its own tied to its Greek-speaking Orthodox community. Its history is marked by episodes of autonomy from the Ottomans and by its character as a coastal community of sailors and emigrants.
The big transformation of both came in the 21st century. As the country opened up to tourism, Sarandë and Himarë went from quiet villages to high-season destinations, with hotels, seafront promenades and sometimes haphazard building along the shore. They are the gateway to the Riviera and account for much of the south's tourism boom.
The Albanian Riviera is the coastal strip running, roughly, from the Llogara Pass to Sarandë, with white villages such as Dhërmi, Vuno and Qeparo overlooking the Ionian Sea and crystal-clear coves at the foot of the mountains. For decades it was one of the least known coasts in the Mediterranean, precisely because of the country's isolation.
That anonymity ended abruptly. In recent years the Riviera, and Ksamil in particular (with its sandy beaches and nearby islets), has become one of the Mediterranean's trendiest destinations, promoted as a cheaper alternative to the Greek or Croatian islands. Growth has been dizzying and has brought familiar problems: illegal building on the beach, pressure on water and services, and tensions over land use in protected areas.
Tourism has thus become one of the main sources of income and jobs in the south, but also an open debate about how to grow without ruining the landscape that draws visitors in the first place. The Ionian coast is today the brightest, and most contested, face of the new Albania.
The southern coast was one of the settings of the great exodus that followed the fall of communism. In 1991, with the country plunged into crisis, thousands of Albanians took to the sea from ports such as Durrës and from all along the Ionian coast in overcrowded boats bound for Italy. The images of the cargo ship Vlora arriving in Bari with more than twenty thousand people on board went around the world.
From the south, emigration also had an overland route: the nearby border with Greece. Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Albanians (many from the Orthodox, Greek-speaking south) crossed the mountains on foot to work in Greece, in construction and farming, sending home remittances that kept entire families afloat.
That mass emigration left a deep mark on the region: villages emptied of young people, houses built with money sent from abroad, and a diaspora that, with the tourism boom, is in some cases starting to return or invest in its homeland. The recent history of the south cannot be understood without that coming and going across the sea and the border.
Berat spreads along both banks of the Osum river, with neighbourhoods of white Ottoman houses stacked up the hillside, one above the other, whose rows of windows earned it the nickname "town of a thousand windows". Its castle, on a rocky hill and continuously inhabited for centuries, is one of the best preserved in Albania: people still live inside its walls, among Byzantine churches and cobbled lanes.
The town has ancient roots (it was the Illyrian Antipatrea) and passed through Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian and Ottoman hands. Its architectural heyday was the Ottoman era, which left mosques and the Christian quarter of Gorica and the Muslim quarter of Mangalem facing each other across the river.
Inside the castle is the Onufri National Museum, devoted to the great 16th-century icon painter known as Onufri, famous for an intense shade of red characteristic of his work. Berat was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008, together with Gjirokastra, as an exceptional example of a Balkan Ottoman town.
Gjirokastra is known as the "stone town" for its Ottoman tower houses from the 17th to 19th centuries, sturdy masonry buildings with grey slate roofs that look like small fortresses. Towering over it all is an imposing castle, one of the largest in the Balkans, which over its history also served as a prison and today houses a weapons museum and even an old aeroplane.
The town was an important commercial and administrative centre under the Ottomans, with a busy bazaar and a strong tradition of craftsmen and notable families. Its historic centre, like Berat's, has been on the UNESCO list since 2008.
Gjirokastra has two famous sons of opposite kinds. Enver Hoxha, the dictator who ruled the country for four decades, was born here in 1908; his birthplace, rebuilt after a fire, now operates as the Ethnographic Museum. And Ismail Kadare, the most important Albanian writer of the 20th century, was also born here, in 1936; his novel Chronicle in Stone is set in this very town. The coexistence of both legacies (the tyrant's and that of the novelist who portrayed life under the dictatorship) neatly sums up the complexity of local memory.
On a series of olive-covered hills near present-day Fier stand the ruins of Apollonia, founded around 600 BC by Greek colonists from Corinth and Corcyra on Illyrian land. It was one of the most prosperous of the many Apollonias of the ancient world, with an economy based on trade and farming and a remarkable cultural life.
Apollonia became famous for its school of philosophy and rhetoric, which drew students from all over the Mediterranean. The most illustrious was the young Octavian (the future emperor Augustus), who was studying there in 44 BC when news reached him of Julius Caesar's assassination, prompting his return to Rome to claim the political inheritance that would carry him to power.
An ally of Rome from the 2nd century BC and, together with Dyrrachium, a starting point of the Via Egnatia, the city declined after an earthquake changed the course of the river and silted up its harbour. Today the site, with its bouleuterion, odeon and portico, is one of the most impressive archaeological complexes in the country and is on UNESCO's tentative list.
Southern Albania is one of the best examples of the country's religious mosaic. Alongside Sunni Islam there is a strong presence of Bektashism, an unorthodox and tolerant Sufi order that found its main refuge in Albania after being banned in Turkey in 1925: the world headquarters of the Bektashi order is in fact in Tirana, but its tekkes (lodges) are scattered across the mountainous south.
Added to this Muslim presence is a significant Orthodox minority, especially around Berat, which was a bishop's seat and keeps numerous Byzantine churches. This mix of Sunnis, Bektashis and Orthodox Christians living in neighbouring villages is a distinctive feature of the region.
Under the dictatorship, all this religious life was banned overnight in 1967, when Albania declared itself an atheist state: tekkes, mosques and churches were closed, demolished or turned into warehouses and gyms. The reopening of these places of worship after 1991 was one of the most visible signs of the return of freedoms in the south of the country.
The historic south has given Albania much of its written and musical culture. Besides Ismail Kadare, born in Gjirokastra and a perennial Nobel Prize in Literature candidate until his death in 2024, the region is the cradle of Albanian iso-polyphony, a traditional unaccompanied multi-voice singing style that UNESCO declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2005.
This music, found above all among the communities of the south (Tosk and Lab), is performed at weddings, funerals and community celebrations, and passes down stories, laments and heroic deeds by word of mouth. It is a living tradition that survived even the communist period, when the regime folded it into its official folk festivals.
The south's cultural weight is partly explained by its history of prosperous trading towns (Berat, Gjirokastra, Korçë) with educated families, contact with Italy and Greece, and heavy emigration that sent ideas and money back to the region. During the national awakening of the 19th century, it was one of the centres of the Albanian cultural revival.
Tirana is a late capital. Founded as a small Ottoman town in 1614 by Sulejman Pasha Bargjini, who built a mosque, a bathhouse and a bakery there, it remained a modest market town until the 20th century. Only in 1920 did the Congress of Lushnjë choose it as Albania's capital, mainly because of its central position, and in 1925 the choice became permanent.
Its current layout bears an Italian stamp: during the 1930s and the fascist occupation, Italian architects designed the monumental axis running south from Skanderbeg Square, with government buildings and the grand Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation. On that base, the communist regime added housing blocks, the pyramid dedicated to Enver Hoxha and a square designed for parades.
After the fall of communism, Tirana reinvented itself in an unusual way: while the artist Edi Rama — later the country's prime minister — was mayor, many grey socialist-era façades were painted in bright colours as a deliberate gesture of breaking with the past. Today the city is home to a large share of the country's population and economy and is the most visible face of an Albania looking towards Europe.
Durrës is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the Balkans. It was founded around 627 BC by settlers from Corinth and Corcyra under the name Epidamnos. The Romans renamed it Dyrrachium — supposedly to avoid the echo of damnum, "loss" — and made it a key port: it was the starting point of the Via Egnatia, the road that crossed the Balkans to Thessaloniki and Constantinople, making the city the empire's great western gateway to the East.
From that golden age survives the largest Roman amphitheatre in the Balkans, built in the 2nd century AD, with room for tens of thousands of spectators and a small early Christian chapel with mosaics inside. The city was also the setting, in 48 BC, of the Dyrrachium campaign between Caesar and Pompey.
Byzantine, then briefly Venetian and Ottoman, Durrës suffered earthquakes and invasions over the centuries. In the 20th century it was for a time the provisional capital of the young Albanian state and the landing point of the Italian invasion of 1939. Today it is the country's main port and a very busy seaside resort in summer, with long beaches south of the old town.
Perched on a mountainside, Krujë is inseparable from Skanderbeg. Its castle, built between the 5th and 6th centuries, was the stronghold from which the Albanian hero led his rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. Between 1450 and 1467, the fortress withstood several massive sieges — including those led personally by sultans Murad II and Mehmed II — with very small garrisons, relying on the steepness of the terrain.
Krujë only fell to the Ottomans in 1478, ten years after Skanderbeg's death, when there was no one left to sustain the resistance. Under Ottoman rule, the town grew around its bazaar, a market of cobbled lanes and wooden shops that is still preserved and still trading.
Inside the castle, the communist regime opened the Skanderbeg Museum in 1982, a monumental building designed by Enver Hoxha's daughter and son-in-law. It is a good example of how Albanian communism appropriated the medieval hero to build its own national narrative: the Krujë that tourists visit today is both a 15th-century fortress and a 20th-century monument.
The strip linking Tirana and Durrës, about 35 kilometres apart, is now home to most of Albania's economic activity. It is the country's most populated and urbanised corridor: the international airport, the main seaport, universities, industry and commerce are all clustered in this central triangle.
That concentration is largely the result of internal migration after 1991. Under communism, people were not allowed to move freely from one town to another; when the regime fell, hundreds of thousands of people from the mountainous north and the rural south poured into Tirana and the coast looking for work, and whole neighbourhoods on the outskirts grew in a haphazard way.
The central coast also lives with the tension typical of rapid development: property pressure on the Durrës shoreline, traffic and urban sprawl sit alongside modernisation projects tied to the country's EU candidacy. This is Albania at its most dynamic and contradictory, where the Roman and Ottoman past is boxed in between new tower blocks.
Central Albania holds some of the places most heavily charged with the memory of the communist period. In Tirana, two museums opened in the last decade (the House of Leaves, the former surveillance headquarters of the Sigurimi, and Bunk'Art, set inside a huge nuclear bunker built for the regime's leadership) tell the story of the spying and repression machine that kept the dictatorship in place, with no euphemisms.
Hoxha's bunkers, the feature that made the regime recognisable around the world, are especially visible in this area: they appear embedded in gardens, beaches and hills around the capital and the coast. Of the more than one hundred thousand built across the country, many are still standing because demolishing them is too expensive.
This way of dealing with memory is recent and still incomplete. For years, post-communist Albania preferred not to look that past in the eye; the opening of these museums is part of an ongoing debate about how to remember the victims of the dictatorship without sliding into either nostalgia or forgetting.
Hardly anything that happened to Albania happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
