Gjirokastër

The ancient town of the area was Antigonia, across the Drino; the hilltop above the modern town was first fortified in the 5th or 6th century and settled in the 13th and 14th. It enters the record in 1336 as Argyrokastro, the silver castle, a Byzantine town of the Despotate of Epirus. By the end of that century the Albanian Zenebishi clan held it as their capital, and in 1418, a year after Gjon Zenebishi's death, it fell to the Ottomans, becoming the seat of the Sanjak of Albania. Over the following centuries much of the Christian population converted to Islam and Muslim converts moved in from the countryside, and the town became a centre of the Bektashi order. Evliya Çelebi, visiting in 1670, counted about 2,000 houses, eight mosques and 280 shops.

Ali Pasha of Ioannina took the town in 1811 and added to the fortress. In 1880 the southern committees of the League of Prizren met here, and the town was a centre of the national awakening. Greek forces held it in 1912–13; awarded to Albania, it became in 1914 the capital of the short-lived Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus. Italy occupied it in 1939, the Greek army held it for five months from December 1940, and German forces took it in 1943.

Enver Hoxha was born here in 1908, and his regime made the town a museum city, sparing it from modern rebuilding. Local Greeks pulled down his statue in 1991. The town saw anti-government protests that led to the unrest of 1997, and was hit hard by the collapse of the pyramid schemes that year; and in 2005 its historic core was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Gjirokastër is called the City of Stone, after the flat dressed stones that roof its old houses. The typical house is a tall stone tower of up to five storeys, with a cistern and stable below and the guest room and family room above, a design thought to come from the fortified country houses of the south; more than 500 are protected as cultural monuments.

The town is a literary place. Ismail Kadare, born here in 1936 and one of Albania's best-known writers, set his novel Chronicle in Stone in the town during the Italian and Greek occupations; he died in 2024. Musine Kokalari wrote her first stories in the Gjirokastër dialect in 1941. Evliya Çelebi called it the city of wailing after hearing a professional mourner's lament.

Music is central. The town is home to both Albanian and Greek polyphonic singing, and the National Folk Festival, held in the fortress roughly every five years since 1968, is the country's most important festival of its kind. Religious life is mixed — Sunni and Bektashi Muslims alongside Orthodox Christians — and the Greek-language newspaper Laiko Vima, founded in 1945, was the only Greek-language paper allowed under communism. Football is followed through Luftëtari Gjirokastër, founded in 1929.

The town itself had about 20,000 residents at the 2011 census, and the wider municipality, which takes in the villages of Antigonë, Cepo, Lazarat, Lunxhëri, Odrie and Picar, about 28,700; those results were affected by a boycott by minorities. Albanians are the majority, with a substantial Greek minority that makes the town a centre of the Greek community in Albania, as well as Aromanians, and Romani and Balkan Egyptians in the Zinxhiraj neighbourhood. There are fourteen Albanian-language schools and two bilingual Albanian–Greek schools.

The economy is mainly commercial, with food, leather and textile production and a chamber of commerce that promotes trade with the Greek border areas. Many traditional houses are being restored for tourism, while others decay through neglect. Ties with Greece cut both ways: the town was one of the first in Albania to suffer in the Greek economic crisis of 2010, as emigrants lost their jobs and came home. The Eqrem Çabej University, opened in 1968, has struggled with low enrolment.

Most people live and shop in the new town in the valley, climbing to the old town for the bazaar, its cafés and the evening walk.

Gjirokastër's best-known dish is qifqi, balls of rice, egg and dried mint fried in a dimpled pan, a dish that originated in the town. Oshaf, a pudding of sheep's milk and dried figs, is the local sweet, and the town is also known for its dairy products, especially its white cheese. Groshët and shqeto are dishes that come from the Lunxhëri villages just outside the town.

The rest of the table is southern Albanian: byrek from the bazaar's pie shops, tavë kosi, and gjel deti me përshesh — turkey boiled, then roasted and served over pieces of bread baked in its broth with mint — at New Year. Japrak, vine leaves stuffed with rice, beef and onion, is served cold with tarator, a sauce of cucumber, garlic, olive oil and yoghurt.

Raki is the common spirit, made mostly from grapes, plums or blackberries, and mulberry raki, raki mani, is a local speciality that is hard to find outside early summer. Coffee is drunk all day in the cafés of the bazaar and the boulevard, and mountain tea, an infusion of ironwort, is the usual hot drink at home.