Albania

August 2-3, 2015

In Albania it’s considered cool not to fasten your seatbelt. A special stopper is inserted into the latch to stop the car from making that beeping noise.

Tirana

Trendy new lampposts.

Durrës

There’s a half-decomposed Roman amphitheatre here that Albania is trying to ram through Unesco to get it inscribed on the world heritage list — so far, unsuccessfully.

Berat

A well-preserved bunker dating back to the times of Enver Hoxha.

Typical Albanian housing.

The historic centre has been smartened up, swept and cleaned. The end result is rather lovely, if a little artificial, because they didn’t make any improvements to the surrounding area.

Someone’s built himself a palace.

Someone else has finished building that ship which was but bare concrete back when I was here six years ago (cf. last photo in this previous story).

Poliçan

A city established to produce weapons. At present, everything is rusting away and operations have ceased.

Gjirokastër

On the whole, a soulful city that sits atop a plain.

Even a dumpster looks nobler when set against such a backdrop.

Replete with ancient history.

With graffiti.

With death notices on the walls.

With cobblestones made to look old.

There’s a highly agreeable historic centre with characteristically Ottoman first floors protruding out over the ground ones (evidently, taxes used to be levied on a building’s footprint, but the storeys they added on circumvented this rule).

The atmosphere here is relaxed and touristy.

Butrint

The very south of Albania.

The geology here is intriguing. It resembles an amphitheatre and a quarry at the same time. I can just imagine how this got Ancient Greek architects thinking.

There are some rather fine Greek and Roman city remains.

Cable ferry. Greece is just a stone’s throw away.