Gjirokastër Fortress

Start with the ground under your feet. It is grey stone, worn smooth by centuries of boots, hooves, and rain. Look up and you see more stone: walls, arches, and long vaulted halls cool even in the summer heat. Look down and the roofs of the old town spread across the hillside in overlapping grey slabs, like the scales of a fish. Out beyond them, the wide green floor of the Drino valley runs toward a line of mountains. This is Gjirokastër Fortress, and it has watched over that valley for a very long time.

The fortress sits on a long limestone ridge above the town. That position explains almost everything about it. From up here, anyone holding the walls could see traffic moving along the valley in both directions, toward the coast and toward the Greek border to the south. Historians generally trace the earliest phases of the castle to the medieval period, roughly the twelfth or thirteenth century. The exact beginnings are uncertain, and different sources give different dates. What is certain is that many builders came after the first ones, and each one left a mark in the stone.

The biggest changes came in the early nineteenth century under Ali Pasha of Tepelena. He was an Albanian-born ruler who governed a large part of the region in the name of the Ottoman Empire, but he often acted like an independent prince. He strengthened and enlarged the fortress, and he also ordered an aqueduct to carry water to the castle from the mountains. Most of that aqueduct has disappeared. Locals still talk about it, though, as a sign of how seriously Ali Pasha took this hilltop and the valley below it.

As you walk through the main galleries, notice how dark and long they are. These are huge vaulted corridors, built of heavy stone, with light entering from the far ends and from small openings. Your footsteps sound louder here. Voices carry. In hot weather this is the coolest place in the whole town, and you may see other visitors slowing down just to stand in the shade. The thickness of the walls is easy to feel when you step from the bright sunlight into this shadow.

Today these galleries hold a museum of weapons. Rows of artillery pieces line the corridor — old cannons, field guns, and heavier guns from the wars of the twentieth century. There are also tanks and armoured vehicles, rusting quietly in the half-light. Many of them were captured from the Italian and German armies that occupied Albania during the Second World War. The display is not polished in a modern way. It feels more like a store room full of iron, and that plainness is part of its strange power.

Here is the first surprise most visitors do not expect. Up on the ramparts, in the open air, stands a silver American jet aircraft. It is an American military training plane that landed in Albania in the late 1950s. The communist government of the time kept it and presented it as proof of American spying. The real story was far less dramatic, and it is usually described as a pilot who went off course. Either way, the plane never left. It is still here, a Cold War souvenir on a medieval wall.

The fortress also has a darker chapter. For much of the twentieth century parts of it were used as a prison. It held prisoners under the Albanian monarchy in the 1930s, during the wartime occupation, and later under the communist regime. Political prisoners were among those held here. The cells are small and cold, and the stone does not let you forget what they were used for. Take a moment if you enter that section. It is a quieter part of the visit, and it deserves to be.

Now walk back toward the open terraces and look at the clock tower. It rises from the walls and can be seen from much of the town below. For generations it was a reference point in daily life. When people in the lower streets looked up, they saw the tower against the sky and knew where they were. From the terrace beside it, you get one of the widest views over the rooftops. This is a good place to pause and let your eyes adjust to the distance.

Those rooftops are the reason Gjirokastër is often called the City of Stone. The old houses are tall, fortified homes, many from the Ottoman period. Their lower floors were built for storage and defence, and the families lived in the upper rooms. The roofs are covered with thin, flat slabs of local stone instead of clay tiles. Together with the town of Berat, the old town of Gjirokastër is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, as a rare surviving example of an Ottoman-era town.

Here is the second surprise. Two very different men who shaped twentieth-century Albania were born in the streets below you. One was Enver Hoxha, the communist leader who ruled the country for four decades. The other was Ismail Kadare, the novelist whose books have been translated into many languages. Kadare wrote a novel called Chronicle in Stone, about a boy growing up in this town during the Second World War. In that book, the fortress and the stone houses feel almost like characters themselves.

The fortress is not only a museum. Its open spaces have been used for Albania's National Folklore Festival, held at intervals since the late 1960s. During those festivals, groups from across the country perform songs, dances, and traditional music. One of the most famous forms is iso-polyphony, a style of singing in which several voices weave together over a long, steady drone. UNESCO recognises this Albanian singing tradition as part of the intangible heritage of humanity. Imagine those voices echoing off these walls on a summer evening.

If you have time, look closely at the walls themselves. You will see different kinds of stonework side by side. Some sections are rough and irregular. Others are more carefully cut and fitted. These differences show repairs and rebuildings from different periods. Nobody built this fortress in one go. It grew, broke, and was patched again many times over many generations. Running your eyes along a single wall is a quick lesson in how long people have needed this hill.

When you are ready to leave, take the walk down slowly. The path drops toward the old bazaar, where stone streets meet at a small crossroads of shops and cafés. The paving stones are steep and can be slippery, especially after rain, so watch your step. As you go, keep looking back over your shoulder. The fortress walls rise above the roofs behind you, grey against the sky. For centuries that was the view that told people in this town that they were home.

So before you go, stand still for one more moment. Feel the stone under your shoes. Listen to the town below — a scooter, a dog, a voice calling from a doorway. Look out across the valley toward the mountains, the same view that guards and prisoners and singers all saw from this spot. The fortress is quiet now. But it has seen almost every chapter of this country's story, and it is still here, keeping watch.