Southern Albania & the Riviera

The south is the part of Albania that faced the Greek world. Colonists from Corinth and Corfu founded Apollonia on the Vjosa plain around 600 BC, and the Chaonians, an Epirote tribe, built Butrint opposite Corfu; inland, Illyrians held hill cities such as Byllis and Antipatrea, the future Berat. Rome had absorbed them all by the middle of the 2nd century BC. Caesar landed his legions at Palaeste, probably modern Palasë, in 48 BC to pursue Pompey, and the young Octavian was studying at Apollonia in 44 BC when news came of Caesar's murder. A 3rd-century earthquake silted the harbour and began the city's decline.

Byzantines, Bulgarians, Angevins and Serbs contested the region in the Middle Ages, and Venice bought Butrint in 1386 and kept it until 1797. The Ottomans took Berat in 1417 and Gjirokastër in 1418, and the two grew into the garrison and market towns whose stone houses survive. In the 18th century the Aromanian merchants of Voskopojë, above Korçë, ran a printing press and an academy until raids in 1769 and 1788 ruined the town; the second was the work of Ali Pasha of Tepelenë, who ruled the south from Ioannina from 1788 to 1822 and received Byron at Tepelenë in 1809.

Ismail Qemali declared Albania's independence at Vlorë on 28 November 1912. The borders of 1913 left a Greek-speaking minority in the south, French troops sponsored an autonomous republic at Korçë in 1916, Italy held Vlorë until an uprising in 1920, and the Greek army drove Mussolini's invasion back across these mountains in the winter of 1940–41. Enver Hoxha, born in Gjirokastër in 1908 and schooled at Korçë's French lycée, declared his birthplace and Berat museum cities, which spared them from concrete, and closed much of the coast around the Soviet submarine base at Pashaliman. The revolt that followed the collapse of the pyramid schemes in 1997 began in Vlorë.

The south speaks Tosk, the dialect on which standard Albanian has been based since 1972, and regards itself as the country's more urbane, outward-looking half — a claim the north disputes. Its signature sound is iso-polyphony, the unaccompanied part-singing of Labëria, the highlands between Vlorë, Tepelenë and Sarandë, in which a drone holds beneath two or three soloists; the national folklore festival has brought it to the castle of Gjirokastër about every five years since 1968. Përmet has its own tradition, clarinet-led instrumental folk music.

Religion is more mixed than in the centre. Orthodox Christianity is strong around Korçë, Berat, Përmet and the coast — Berat's 16th-century icon painter Onufri, famous for a red that copyists never matched, is its great artist — while Gjirokastër and Tepelenë are largely Muslim, and the Bektashi keep tekkes across the region and climb Mount Tomorr each August on pilgrimage to the shrine of Abbas Ali. A recognised Greek minority lives in the villages of Dropull, in Himara and around Sarandë, where signs and church services are bilingual; Aromanians remain in Voskopojë, and Macedonian-speakers on Lake Prespa.

Korçë has the most distinct civic culture: the first Albanian-language school opened there in 1887, and its August beer festival is the largest in the country.

Vlorë is the south's largest town: a port, a university and a summer resort with a seafront of new apartment towers. Fier, with some 53,000, is the workaday capital of the Myzeqe plain and of Albania's oil district; Korçë, Berat, Sarandë and Gjirokastër are the other main towns. Every one of them has lost people since 1990 to Tirana, Greece and Italy, and the villages of Dropull, Zagoria and the Korçë highlands are close to empty outside August, when the emigrants come home.

Work on the coast is seasonal. Sarandë, Ksamil, Himara and Dhërmi earn a year's income between June and September, and the building boom that feeds them — hotels behind the beaches at Ksamil, villas on the Riviera hillsides, a new airport on the edge of the Vjosa delta — is the region's loudest argument, along with water shortages and traffic in August. Inland, Myzeqe grows vegetables under plastic, olives and wheat, Berat and Përmet sell wine, raki and preserves, Korçë grows apples and potatoes and brews beer, and the Patos-Marinëz oilfield near Fier, among the largest onshore fields in Europe, still pumps.

The day follows the heat: early coffee, a closed afternoon, and the xhiro at dusk along Vlorë's Lungomare, Sarandë's bay front or Korçë's pedestrian boulevard. Korçë, at 850 metres, keeps a cooler and more orderly tempo, with snow most winters and weekenders from Tirana filling its guesthouses.

On the coast the food is Ionian: grilled sea bream and bass, octopus, prawns and, above all, the mussels of the Butrint lagoon, eaten steamed or baked with rice at Ksamil. Vlorë and Himara press olive oil, and the roadside restaurants at the Llogara Pass roast lamb and kid on the spit.

Gjirokastër's speciality is qifqi, balls of rice, egg and dried mint fried in a dimpled pan and found almost nowhere else, followed by oshaf, a pudding of sheep's milk and dried figs. Gjel deti me përshesh, turkey served over pieces of bread baked in its broth, is the New Year dish here as across much of Albania. Përmet is known for its fruit preserves and compotes, and Korçë for lakror, a pie with layers of dough thinner than a byrek, cooked on embers under a metal lid, and for koran, the trout of Lake Ohrid.

The south also makes some of the country's best-known drinks. Skrapar, in the hills south-east of Berat, is known for its raki, and Përmet for its raki and wine; Albanian wine draws on native grapes such as Vlosh and Debinë; and Birra Korça, founded in 1928, is Albania's oldest brewery. Mountain tea, an infusion of wild ironwort, is a common hot drink.

Berat and Gjirokastër are the two Ottoman towns on the World Heritage list. Berat stacks the white, many-windowed houses of Mangalem and Gorica on either bank of the Osum beneath a castle that is still lived in, with the Onufri icon museum in its cathedral; Mount Tomorr and the Osum canyon near Çorovodë are its day trips. Gjirokastër is greyer and steeper, with slate-roofed tower houses, a bazaar at the crossroads, and a castle holding a captured American jet.

Vlorë has the Independence Monument, the 16th-century Muradie Mosque and the island monastery of Zvërnec in the Narta lagoon; the Karaburun peninsula and Sazan island form a national marine park. South of the town the road climbs through the pines of Llogara National Park to 1,027 metres and drops to the Riviera: Palasë, Dhërmi, the canyon beach of Gjipe, Himara with its old upper town, Ali Pasha's fort at Porto Palermo and Borsh. Sarandë faces Corfu across its bay; Ksamil's islets lie a dozen kilometres south, and beyond them is Butrint, with its Greek theatre, Roman forum, baptistery mosaic and Venetian towers on a wooded peninsula. Inland, the Blue Eye spring wells up from a shaft more than 50 metres deep.

On the Fier plain are Apollonia, its columned council-house façade and monastery on a hill of olives, and the pelican lagoon of Divjakë-Karavasta National Park. The Vjosa, protected since 2023 as Europe's first wild river national park, runs past Tepelenë and Përmet, where the thermal springs of Bënjë rise. In the east, Korçë has its cathedral, restored bazaar, the Mirahori Mosque of the 1490s and the icons of the National Museum of Medieval Art, with Voskopojë's frescoed churches and the ski village of Dardhë in the hills. North of it lie Pogradec and the mosaics of Lin on Lake Ohrid, and to the east Prespa National Park, with the cave church on Maligrad island.