Introducing Berat

A highlight of any trip to Albania, Berat is one of the country’s most beautiful towns, having been preserved as a museum city by the communist government. Its most striking feature is the collection of white Ottoman houses climbing up the hill to the castle, earning it the title ‘town of a thousand windows’. Its rugged mountain setting is archetypically Albanian, and particularly evocative when the clouds swirl around the tops of the minarets and battlements.

In the 3rd century BC an Illyrian fortress called Antipatria was built here on the site of an earlier settlement. The Byzantines strengthened the hilltop fortifications in the 5th and 6th centuries, as did the Bulgarians 400 years later. The Serbs, who occupied the citadel in 1345, renamed it Beligrad (White City) and there is speculation that this is where the town’s name comes from. In 1450 the Ottomans took Berat, and after a period of decline it began to thrive in the 18th and 19th centuries as a crafts centre, specialising in woodcarving. For a brief time in 1944 Berat was the capital of liberated Albania.

Berat suffers terribly from power cuts in the winter, and generators are not widely used. While the Osum River that divides the town is fairly dirty, the streets are mostly free of the rubbish that blankets the country. We even saw a team of street cleaners on our last visit! There are several ATMs and an internet café on the main strip.