ALBANIA LETTER:Sarandë is overrun with Mercs, but a short trip brings you to Butrint: a stroll through the history of European man, writes PETER MURTAGH
THE NEW, the recent past and the very distant past sit beside each other in south western Albania. Its a place of jostling contrasts.
Arriving by ferry in Sarandë, the new hits you face on when you disembark. Walking up from the small harbour, almost the first business you encounter is an estate agent whose window is jam packed with computer images of off-plan apartment investment opportunities. Just like home, circa 10 years ago!
Scattered around the city of some 30,000 people are the half finished blocks, most of them five to eight stories high, up for grabs. Greeks quip that they are built on the proceeds of questionable funding from Albanians living overseas – criminal money is what they mean. There’s a veneer of money in some parts of the city, the coastal strip, for instance, with its cool cafés and restaurants (tuna salad and half litre of local white wine €5) and tourist shops could be in any Mediterranean resort.
Behind the strip near the harbour, however, a large corrugated iron shed is home to a ramshackle fruit and vegetable market where farmers’ wives sell home-produced olive oil in dingy recycled plastic bottles. The city is overrun by Mercs all of which seem to be 20 and more years old. There must be more Mercedes Benz saloons per square kilometre in Sarandë than anywhere in the world outside Germany.
And then, whizzing through the dusty streets, you’ll see a big four-wheel drive, a top of the range Audi perhaps, with smoked windows. Outsiders reckon many of these vehicles are stolen to order, in places like Germany and Britain, driven to Albania where sometimes, the new “owners” don’t even bother to change the plates.
The bus south out of the city along the coast (fare to the end of the 20km run is 70 cents) passes some relics of the recent past – a few of the over 700,000 roadside bunkers built during the era, 1944 to 1985, of Enver Hoxha, the paranoid dictator who turned Albania into a Stalinist-Maoist wasteland isolated from the rest of the planet.
But the road itself is almost brand new. It emerged initially in 1959 for a visit by the then Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev, but looks like it was resurfaced the day before yesterday. And then, suddenly after 20kms, it ends as it hits the banks of the Vivari channel, a narrow waterway connecting the Ionian Sea and an inland salt lake rich in fish.
To get to the other side and indeed the rest of south western Albania and on to northern Greece, one must use a rickety wooden raft clamped to cables pulled by a winch – a Heath Robinson-like contraption that is a sight to behold and would give a health and safety inspector palpitations.
I am here to visit Butrint, an archaeological site; one of the most extraordinary such places in all of Europe.
It is a peninsula hill, maybe an eighth the size of Howth in Dublin and a similar shape. It contains evidence of human settlement from the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras to the Bronze and Iron Ages, and from the various manifestations of ancient Greek civilisation, the Classical and Hellenistic periods, to the Romans. There is evidence also of what went on here in the early Christian centuries and in the Middle Ages. Finally, the Venetians and the Ottomans left their marks.
To walk through the excavated ruins of Butrint is to stroll through the history of European man.
Early settlers came for the food; the salt lake was and is a rich source. Later settlers (the Greeks) came also for the fresh water flowing through the limestone rock. They believed in its curative powers and were sure Asclepius, their god of medicine, was working her magic.
The early Greeks built an acropolis, a citadel atop Butrint’s highest point.
They left behind evidence of urban living and trade, the foundations of homes and fragments of pottery from Corinth, for instance. By the 4th century BC, Butrint boasted streets, houses, places to stay and eat; homes for priests and pilgrims and a theatre.
The one you can see today is the Roman theatre, perhaps one of the best preserved Roman amphitheatres in all Europe, buried for centuries until found by an Italian archaeologist in 1928.
On one side of it is the treasury building; on the other side the public baths.
Beside them are the remains of the forum, itself built over the Greek agora, or market. Elsewhere in the complex, the Romans built a gymnasium and a number of nympheums. There are homes, enormous villas and townhouses, that were lived in by the rich, as well as more modest dwellings.
And when the Roman faded away and the Christians came, they built churches aplenty – including a basilica and a baptistery.
The Venetians left an elegant tower on the bank of Vivari channel, a beautiful, simple square building that today stands sentinel by the water. On top of the hill is a somewhat over-restored Venetian castle that is now home to a museum.
In the 2nd century AD, the Romans built a viaduct, which was probably also an aqueduct across the Vivari, where settlement, large villas and farms, expanded across the fertile plain. Two thousand years ago, there was less palaver crossing the channel than there is today.
The Albanian authorities run Butrint very well – low key, unfussy and with an entrance fee of just €5.
The extraordinary programme of restoration going on there is driven by the Butrint Foundation, which was established in 1993 by two British peers, Lords Rothschild and Sainsbury, who remain substantial donors towards it to this day.