Wall Street Journal: Gjirokastra, the most intriguing city in the world

Gjirokastra, in southern Albania, may not be the first destination to come to mind if you decide to make a trip to Europe this end-of-the-art. But this hilly city of 66,000 is extremely attractive and affordable, as well as two hours by car away from beautiful beaches on the Albanian coast. Are you still not convinced? A real time capsule, Gjirokastra served as a shopping center for some 500 years under the Ottoman Empire (1385-1912) and as a stage for a real “Game of Throns”. Put in there a medieval castle, a communist-era underground bunker and a “avion of spies” of the United States, and Gjirokastra can really be the smallest intriguing city you've never heard of.

During my weekend in Gjirokastra, I stayed at the Santato House, located right under the large Gothic fortress. Although housing is simple (even private rooms have common toilets), the structure is quite the opposite. A XIX-century Ottoman house with elegant lines of windows and warm inner wooden environments, Santato is one of the many historical restorations undertaken in the last decade by the non-profit Gjirokastra Foundation.

After my arrival in Babemto, I met the executive director of the foundation, Sadi Petrela, and we looked across the garden walls: fabulous palaces in the surrounding hills, an 18th century minaret floating on clay roofs and, further away, mountain ridges. The foundation has been at the top of more than 50 projects, including the rehabilitation of cobbled roads and the restoration of the market in the Old Town, dubbed “Stone City” thanks to hundreds of stone buildings. The largest project may be the Zekat House, a residence in 1811, now a museum. And Mr. and I. Petrela walked to Zekates on the other side of the city, and he felt compelled, according to local custom, to talk to anyone who knew almost everyone. I noticed few foreign tourists during my visit to Gjirokastra. After a few days, women standing on the doorstep, and men who drink Turkish coffee in cafes greet me as if I were local.

The House of Zekat initially belonged to a senior official of Chief Commander Ali Pasha. Ali Pasha invaded Gjirokastra and made it a fortress against the Ottoman regime. Built during this time of civil unrest and ruthless banditism, Zekat was built as a fortress, with thick stone walls, heavy reinforced doors and small windows. In the residential neighborhoods, the upper floors of the houses are the low - couched waithouse next to the wall, the tall wooden ceilings, and a majestic chimney adorned with flower patterns that are repeated on the frescoes of the wall. After we returned with Mr. President. Petral in Zekat, we sat down for coffee with Zekat, the elderly couple who inherited and managed the house. The little building where they live now was once for servants”, says Petrela. After the Communist regime ruled the residence, the Zekat family became impoverished.

In fact, the Communists seized many historic buildings in Gjirokastra; after the regime collapsed in 1991, all buildings were returned to families who owned them. The foundation is not just working to return these buildings their former glory. Part of each project is a business plan hoping to bring home family members, many of whom have left to seek jobs abroad. Home Babametto, for example, will be handed over to the owners next year, as it generates enough revenue as a hotel to pay for renovation costs. We want to show the owners that these houses can produce money and that they can have a promising future”, says Mr. Petrela.

The Communist past of Gjirokastra is also being preserved.

The next day, Mr. Petral invited me to visit the Cold War Museum, which opened in 2014 after various bureaucratic battles. The museum includes a bunker with mazes built in secret in the 1970s and discovered only decades later. This narrow network of tunnels connects about 80 rooms, which are still labeled with their official functions and filled with rusty metal furniture.

The evolution of the big fortress rising above the bunker embodys the challenges of Balkan history. Ali Pasha and King Zog, the Albanian ruler in the early 20th century, expanded the structure during their reign and used it as prison, just as the Nazis and Communists also used it as a torture chamber until 1963. Now transformed into the National Armed Museum, it houses an impressive collection of World War II artillery, including an American spy plane seized in 1957. When we built the museum in the fortress, we were charged by the government for corruption and that we were nostalgic to communism “, Petrela says. “But this is certainly a very important part of our history. ”

The castle also serves as a festive space. On the evening I was found there, a concert was organised by the tour group Fanfara Tirana and popular singer Hysni Zela a fusion of synchronized Balkan rhythms accompanied by the clarineta. I joined the dance around that began spontaneously among the youth public, and I did very well.

The lace curtain wave greeted me as I woke up at Santato's house the next morning. As I watched Ottoman buildings sprinkling up hills, a passage written in 1933 by British travel writer Patrick Leigh Farmer came to mind. Gjirokastra, he wrote, is the “is a very old and completely new and very unknown”. Almost 100 years later, his description is still true.

W SJ. com