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Published: October 17th 2010
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Castle of Kanina
They are not very good at putting up signs to help you find the way to tourist sites. It took us one and a half hours to find this castle instead of the 20 minutes the drive should have taken. Sheep, cows and a ship where they don't belong
In the previous blog we made on Albania we wrote about our visit to Berati. We there wrote that "Berati has a picturesque old town and on a hill towering over the town there is a fortress." The first city we are going to write about here in this blog entry, Gjirokaster, can be described with exactly the same words: Gjirokaster has a picturesque old town and on a hill towering over the town there is a fortress. Or at least that is how we are supposed to describe the city. But the thing is we liked Berati a lot and in comparison Gjirokaster gave us a pretty bleak impression. The old town was less picturesque and the fortress was good but not better than many other fortresses we have seen. Gjirokaster was supposed to be a highlight of this trip in Albania but turned out to be a disappointment.
But disappointment wasn't the only feeling we felt in Gjirokaster. For a while we also felt pure horror. To drive a car through the old town of Gjirokaster is quite an experience. The streets were narrow, there were cars parked
Castle of Kanina
Well, we did get some astonishing views once we got there so it was still worth it. on both sides, there were people walking everywhere, there were cars coming from the side streets, there were cars in front of us, there were cars behind us and, this is a good one, we had cars above and below us! We are not joking, the inclination of the street was roughly 30%, and we were going uphill, so there really were cars above and below us. Ake was doing the driving that day and he was very happy that he before entering the city was blissfully unaware of what driving in Gjirokaster old town was like.
We might as well write a little more about driving in Albania. The standard of the roads was a lot better than we expected. An exception was the road between Saranda and Butrint (we will tell you about those two places later in this blog entry). That road was in a terrible condition. But that was only because they were building a brand new road, a road that is likely to have very high standard once it is finished.
But even though the roads in general were good there were some sections that frightened us a bit. A few times we
A boat away from the ocean
It is a complete riddle to us why someone has built a ship in a field in the middle of nowhere. came to places where the road had collapsed and half the road was simply missing. Once we came to a place where the road passed through a village and the corner of one house in the village was actually sticking out at least one meter into the road. Sadly we didn't take a photo of that. Now afterwards we wish we had taken the time to stop, turn back and photographed that house-in-the-road because that really looked weird.
When we were driving from Gjirokaster to Saranda we passed through a small village named Mesopotami. The village is not likely to have anything to do with ancient Mesopotamia. The similarity between the names is as far as we know only a coincident. The village has an interesting little church we stopped to have a look at. The church dates back to the 12th century. Before the 1940-ies the church was part of a monastery and there was then several other buildings there. During the communist rule Albania was supposed to be an atheist state and the communists destroyed most of the buildings that belonged to the monestary. They also destroyed parts of the main church.
A few kilometers away
Fortress in Gjirokaster
On a hill towering over Gjirokaster there is a fortress. from Mesopotamia there is a place that goes under the name Blue Eye. At this spot a few natural springs emerge from the ground together creating a small river. The water is very clear and is either blue or green depending on where you observe it. The flow of water from the well can be as high as 15 cubic meter per second so it is quite a big flow.
One of the most popular tourist sites in Albania is a collection of Greek and Roman ruins that goes under the name Butrint. They are located deep south in Albania and on the way there we stopped in a city called Saranda for the night. Saranda was a place that could have been taken straight out of
The Twilight Zone. We were warned that the city was a construction site but it didn't look like any construction site we have ever seen before. There was hardly a single house that was finished. They all looked either half finished or were just a foundation with a few walls. But what made it look really weird was that we couldn't really notice any construction work going on.
In many houses we could
Fortress in Gjirokaster
The fortress was good but not better than many other fortresses we have seen see that they had built the ground floor and finished that so that they could move in and after that they seemed to have decided not to build the rest of the house leaving it half finished. Weirdest of all was a house across the road from the guesthouse where we were staying. That house had collapsed from damages to critical sections of the structure. Still there were people living in the house. Apparently one or two rooms had survived when the rest of the house collapsed and the family who owned the house lived there now.
We never managed to understand why the city looked so weird, so half finished, but we did get an explanation to the house across the street that was falling apart. It turned out that there was nothing wrong with the original construction of the house and there had not been any earthquake. The reason is that the family who owns the house, or whatever you can call it, started to build it before they had received permission to build. When the authorities found out that they were building a house without a permit they simply came there and knocked it down. Maybe
Walking the sheep
A shepherd walking his sheep home that explanation can be used also for other houses in Saranda. We are not sure about that but on almost every house the owners had hung little dolls or teddy bears either at the gate or from the roof of the house. These were lucky charms to protect the house from trouble. Since just about every house had one or more of these lucky charms it seems to us that either people are very superstitious or many people had run into problems of one kind or another and thus people thought they really needed the house to be protected against bad things happening to it.
When we arrived in the guesthouse where we stayed in Saranda the owner was at first very surprised when we showed up and she seemed to be a bit unsure of how to handle us. Later it was explained to us that she had opened the guesthouse only a few days before and we were actually her very first guest. The owner took a photo of us as a memory.
In the morning we left Saranda and drove to Butrint. The road was in such a bad shape that we could almost have
Abandoned vehicle
Next to what looked like a disused oilfield we saw this vehicle parked. It's nothing special, we just liked the photo walked in the same pace as we drove. At one place along the way there was a car parked in the middle of the street. 100 meters behind that car a black line started and that line went all the way up to the car where it no longer was a line but a black puddle. They had driven that car a bit too fast and a rock had cracked something vital so the car was leaking oil. We are happy that didn't happen to us.
The archaeological site
Butrint has ruins from the Greek and the Roman empires. The site has been important for maybe as long as 2,500 years and there are also ruins there from other eras. But the most important are the Greek and Roman ones.
After having spent a few hours at Butrint we started driving north again along the coast. When we came north of Saranda the road went though a mountainous area next to the ocean, a stretch of the Albanian coast known as the Riviera. The views we got from the road along this road were simply spectacular. We stopped at a few places to enjoy the views and once
Don't go where the roads don't go
The standard of the roads was a lot better than we expected. This is an exception also to have a swim in the clear blue waters of the Adriatic Sea. But we will now stop our stories for this blog entry and we will continue in the next. That is the third and final chapter on Albania.
By the way, it is a complete riddle to us and the writers of the guidebook why someone has built a ship in a field in the middle of nowhere. A hotel? A restaurant? An outhouse? Your guess is as good as ours.
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Maria T
non-member comment
Joke
Do they still have the terrible coke-copy (with a very similar logo as Coke) called 'Joy Cola' or 'Joke'? (Was the only the color that was anywhere near Coke, one of the few sodas you could get hold of when I was there.)