Albania

The Albanians trace their roots to the Illyrians, a cluster of tribes who lived along the eastern Adriatic in antiquity and were absorbed, but never wholly replaced, by Rome. The territory then passed through Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Venetian hands before the Ottoman conquest, largely complete by the late fifteenth century after the long resistance led by the national hero Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg.

Nearly four and a half centuries of Ottoman rule left the deepest marks on the country: a large Muslim population, the bazaar towns, and the stone-and-timber houses of Berat and Gjirokastër. Independence came in 1912, in the chaos of the Balkan Wars. The short interwar period produced a self-declared king, Zog I, and ended with Italian and then German occupation.

In 1944 the communist partisans took power under Enver Hoxha, who ruled until his death in 1985 and turned Albania into the most isolated state in Europe — an official atheist country that broke first with the West, then with the Soviet Union, then with China, and dotted its landscape with hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers. The regime fell in 1991. A ruinous collapse of nationwide pyramid savings schemes in 1997 brought the state close to civil war. Albania joined NATO in 2009 and is now a candidate for European Union membership.

Albanian identity is built on language and shared history more than on religion. The population is nominally about half Muslim — including the Bektashi, a liberal Sufi order whose world headquarters is in Tirana — alongside Orthodox and Catholic minorities, and the everyday attitude to faith is famously relaxed. Mixed families and mixed villages are ordinary, and the coexistence is a point of national pride.

Two old codes still shape social life. Besa is a personal pledge of honour — to keep a promise, and to protect a guest even at cost to yourself. The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, a body of customary law from the northern highlands, once governed everything from marriage to the blood feud; its harsher provisions have faded but its language of honour and hospitality has not.

Daily rituals matter. The xhiro, an unhurried evening walk along the main street, empties the cafés and fills the pavements in every town at dusk. Coffee is a social institution — Albania has one of the highest densities of cafés in the world — and in the south, the haunting multi-part iso-polyphony singing is recognised by UNESCO.

About a third of Albanians live in and around Tirana, a young, fast-changing city of painted apartment blocks, traffic, and construction cranes. The rest of the country is far quieter: farming towns on the plains, fishing and tourism on the coast, and shrinking villages in the mountains, many of them sustained by money sent home from relatives working in Italy, Greece, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

The rhythm of the day is Mediterranean. Work starts early, the midday break is long, and life moves outdoors in the evening. Markets sell what is in season — olives, citrus, tomatoes, watermelons, mountain honey and cheese — and the extended family remains the main safety net, with grandparents raising children while parents work abroad or in the city.

Infrastructure has improved sharply since the 1990s but unevenly. Power and water are reliable in the cities and patchier in remote areas; roads range from smooth new highways to single-track mountain tracks. Emigration is the defining social fact of the past thirty years, and reversing it is the central promise of every government.

Albanian cooking is Mediterranean with Ottoman and Italian layers: olive oil, lemon, garlic, fresh herbs, grilled meat and fish, and a lot of dairy. The dish most often called national is tavë kosi — lamb or mutton baked in a tangy custard of yoghurt and egg until it sets. Fërgesë, a skillet of peppers, tomato, and cottage-style cheese, is close behind.

Bread and pastry are everywhere. Byrek — flaky filo layered with cheese, spinach, minced meat, or squash — is the standard cheap meal, sold by weight from dedicated shops. Along the coast the emphasis shifts to seafood: grilled sea bass and bream, mussels farmed in the Butrint lagoon, and small fried fish eaten whole.

Meals lean on what the household produces. Homemade cheese, yoghurt and dhallë (a salted yoghurt drink), pickles, and cured meats start a meal; strong Turkish-style coffee or a glass of raki, the clear grape spirit distilled at home in autumn, ends it. In the mountains the food is heavier — cornbread, slow-cooked kid, lakror pie, and trout from the rivers.

Two Ottoman-era towns anchor any first visit. Berat, the "town of a thousand windows," stacks white houses up a gorge beneath a still-inhabited castle; Gjirokastër, birthplace of both Enver Hoxha and the novelist Ismail Kadare, is a steep grey town of fortified stone houses. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, as is Butrint in the far south — a wooded peninsula layered with Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Venetian ruins above a lagoon.

The coast is the other draw. The Albanian Riviera runs south from the Llogara Pass along the Ionian Sea, with villages such as Dhërmi and Himarë and the tiny, much-photographed islets off Ksamil. Inland, the karst spring known as the Blue Eye (Syri i Kaltër) wells up an impossibly clear blue-green from an unmeasured depth.

For mountains, the northern Albanian Alps — the "Accursed Mountains" — hold the country's best hiking: the classic day walk between the valleys of Theth and Valbona, and the cross-border Peaks of the Balkans trail linking Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro. Lake Ohrid, shared with North Macedonia and one of the oldest lakes on Earth, sits on the eastern border. In Tirana, the two BUNK'ART museums use the dictatorship's own bunkers to tell its story.