Epidamnos

Listen for a moment. Under the traffic of modern Durrës, under the scooters and the café chatter and the gulls over the port, there is another city. You cannot hear it, but you can sometimes see it. A curve of old brick between apartment blocks. A column drum resting in a courtyard. A dip in the pavement where the ground was opened and never fully closed. That buried city has a name older than Albania itself. The ancient Greeks called it Epidamnos.

The story begins in the seventh century before Christ. Greek colonists sailed north up the Adriatic coast and chose this shoreline for a new settlement. They came from Corcyra, the island we now call Corfu, together with settlers from Corinth, its mother city on the Greek mainland. Ancient writers place the founding around 627 BCE. The site made sense. There was a sheltered bay, a fertile plain behind it, and Illyrian peoples inland who had goods to trade.

Greek cities often carried two names, and this one did too. Epidamnos was the name of the city. A second name, Dyrrachion, seems to have belonged at first to the rocky headland or the harbour beside it. Over the centuries the second name won. The Romans used it in Latin as Dyrrachium. Much later, in Albanian, it became Durrës. So when you say the name of the modern city, you are still speaking a word that Greek sailors used.

Here is the first surprise. This quiet colony on the edge of the Greek world played a part in one of the great wars of antiquity. The historian Thucydides, writing in the fifth century before Christ, described a political crisis inside Epidamnos. Rival factions asked for outside help. Corcyra and Corinth took opposite sides, and the quarrel grew. Thucydides lists this dispute among the events that led to the Peloponnesian War, the long conflict between Athens and Sparta.

Think about that for a moment. Athens, Sparta, the Parthenon, Pericles... and one of the sparks that set that world on fire was struck here, on this coast. Most visitors who walk the seafront promenade have no idea. The city was never an Athens or a Corinth in size. But its position mattered. Whoever held this harbour held a door between the Greek south, the Illyrian interior, and the sea route to Italy.

That door became even more important under Rome. From the second century before Christ, Dyrrachium was firmly in the Roman orbit. Ships crossed from the Italian port of Brundisium, today's Brindisi, and landed here. From here began the Via Egnatia, a great Roman road that ran east across the Balkans toward Thessaloniki and, in later centuries, Constantinople. Soldiers, officials, merchants and letters all passed through this town. It was, in a real sense, a gateway between two halves of an empire.

The second surprise is a battle. In 48 BCE, during the Roman civil war, Julius Caesar and his rival Pompey faced each other around Dyrrachium. Both armies dug long lines of trenches and fortifications across the hills near the city. Caesar tried to trap Pompey against the sea, and the attempt failed. Caesar was forced to withdraw. He later won the war in Greece, but here, on this ground, he suffered one of the hardest setbacks of his career.

The clearest trace of Roman Dyrrachium stands right in the old centre. It is the amphitheatre, built around the second century after Christ. It is counted among the largest Roman amphitheatres in the Balkans. Crowds once sat on its curved terraces to watch gladiator fights and public spectacles. Then, over many centuries, houses were built on top of it, and the city slowly forgot it was there. Serious excavation only began in the 1960s.

Walk around the amphitheatre and look at the layers. You will see Roman brick and stone in the arched passages beneath the seating. In one of those passages, Christians later created a small chapel, and traces of early Christian wall mosaics have survived there. Above and around the arena, modern homes still press close to the ancient walls. Part of the structure is still buried under them. The past and the present are not separated here. They share the same street.

The city kept changing hands after Rome. It became an important Byzantine stronghold on the Adriatic. The emperor Anastasius I, who ruled in Constantinople around the year 500, was born here. Normans, Venetians, Serbian rulers and Ottomans all fought over or held the town at different times. Each left something behind. Near the seafront you can still see sections of the Byzantine city walls, and a round tower that later builders, including the Venetians, reinforced and reused.

If you want to see the small objects that bring Epidamnos close, visit the Archaeological Museum near the seafront. Inside are pottery, tombstones, statues and coins from the Greek and Roman city. One famous mosaic, often called the Beauty of Durrës, shows a woman's face surrounded by flowers. It was made with small river pebbles in the Hellenistic period, the centuries after Alexander the Great. Seen up close, the pebbles are simple. Seen together, they make a calm, living face.

Modern Durrës has not always made life easy for its ancient city. Building work regularly uncovers new remains, from foundations to fragments of baths and streets. Some are studied and preserved. Some are recorded and covered again. Earthquakes have shaken this coast many times, including a severe one in 2019. Archaeologists here work in a living city, not an empty field. That tension is part of the story. Epidamnos survives because people never stopped living on top of it.

So as you stand here, try to see the city as a stack of pages. At the bottom, a Greek harbour town that once worried Athens and Sparta. Above it, the Roman port where the Via Egnatia began. Then Byzantine walls, a Venetian tower, Ottoman streets, and the concrete and glass of today. The sea is the one thing that has stayed the same. It still meets the shore in the same bay the first colonists chose.

Before you move on, look down at the ground under your feet. Look at the old stones set into the newer streets, at the brick showing through plaster on a wall nearby. Listen to the port, and to the waves along the promenade. For more than two and a half thousand years, people have arrived here by sea and stayed. As you walk away, you are walking over Epidamnos too... one more traveller in a very long line.