History calls you

Albania seizes its moment in the sun

- VALERIYA SAFRONOVA

In southern Albania, practically swimming distance from the Greek island of Corfu, the city of Butrint has stood for thousands of years.

Its crumbled remains are a history buff’s dream: an open-air theatre from when the city was a Greek colony, a Byzantine baptistery and a Roman aqueduct. Foxes, peregrine falcons and golden eagles roam the national park that encompasses Butrint’s archaeological treasures.

A 10-minute bus ride away from Butrint, in the low-slung, modern beach resort of Ksamil, tourists lounge on sun beds, dance to pounding techno and manoeuvre personal watercraft around a picturesque bay made popular by social media influencers, who compare its lush setting to the Maldives.

Albania is the kind of destination where a traveller can start the day with a walk through antiquity and end it with a twirl on the sand. That might be one big reason so many people are going there. Last year, 11.7 million people visited the country — up from 10 million the previous year — and they not only headed to the beaches and historic sites, but also explored the mountains and lakes in the north, and the unspoiled Vjosa Wild River National Park, one of the “New York Times 52 Places To Go” in 2023.

“Albania is still an exotic place for a lot of people,” said Frenkli Prengaj, who operates tours for Discover Albania and spent two days driving me around.

“When a tourist comes to Albania, they don’t have a lot of expectations. They discover the history and realise we have a lot in common with Europe, a lot of history with the Ottomans. We're somehow stuck between East and West.”

The country, sandwiched between Greece and Montenegro along the Adriatic and Ionian seas, declared independence from Ottoman rule in 1912, and starting in the 1940s, spent decades under a Stalinist dictatorship, isolated from the rest of the world, until 1992.