Albania: once and future glories

On a promontory high above the Vjose river valley, among olive trees and turban-topped Dervish graves, we came to the ruins of Byllis. We explored the city’s stout Roman walls, its agora, theatre and bathhouse, and pottered about the column-strewn foundations of late-antique basilicas. Glimpses of mosaic – a figure milking a goat, or feeding a hunting dog – hinted at the magnificent pavements beneath the protective covering of sand.

It might have frustrated us that – this being Albania – such mosaics could not be displayed for lack of funds. Even so, lunching at a nearby restaurant on pork chops sprinkled with oregano and washed down with a robust local wine, the overall feeling was exhilaration that we had the place – restaurant, view, archaeological site and even, it sometimes seemed, the entire oddball country – all to ourselves.

Albania’s abundant archaeology has been recognised since the likes of Lord Byron and Edward Lear discovered this atmospheric Balkan backwater in the 19th century. Even in the 1980s, with the country deep in communist isolation, Westerners holidaying on adjacent Greek Corfu returned bright-eyed and tantalised after day visits to the evocative coastal site at Butrint.