Berat Old Town Explorer

About this pack

A 5-day mid-range trip to Berat, Albania, taking in Berat Castle, Gorica Bridge, Osum Canyon and Apollonia ruins.

Inside the Berat Old Town Explorer trip

Berat Old Town Explorer centres on Berat Castle, the fortress the Albanians call Kalaja e Beratit, standing on a rocky hill above the town on the right bank of the Osum river at an elevation of 214 metres and reachable only from the south. Its walls were first strengthened in the 5th century under the Roman emperor Theodosius II against Barbarian incursions into the Balkans, rebuilt again under Justinian I in the 6th century, and given their present 13th-century phase under Michael I Komnenos Doukas, Despot of Epirus and a cousin of the Byzantine emperor — a phase still visible today as a monogram picked out in red brick on one of the castle walls. Inside, a population that was largely Christian once supported around twenty Albanian Orthodox churches built mostly in the 13th century, alongside a single mosque built for the Turkish garrison, of which only a few ruins and the base of a minaret survive. The churches held frescoes and iconostases by noted Albanian icon painters including Onufri, whose own museum stands in Berat today, and the castle's silhouette is familiar enough in Albania to appear on the reverse of the 10 lekë coin issued in 1996, 2000 and 2013.

From the citadel the walk continues to Gorica Bridge, also known as the Kurt Ahmed Pasha bridge, an Ottoman-era crossing of the Osum built after 1777 by Ahmet Kurt Pasha, ruler of the Pashalik of Berat. It is one of the oldest and most recognisable Ottoman bridges in Albania, connecting two quarters of the town; the original structure was built in wood in 1780 before being rebuilt in stone during the 1920s. The finished bridge has seven arches, runs 129 metres long and 5.3 metres wide, and stands about 10 metres above the average water level, with a further renovation carried out by the Municipality of Berat in 2015. Local legend attaches a darker story to the earlier wooden version, holding that a dungeon built into the bridge once held a girl who was incarcerated and starved to appease the spirits thought responsible for the bridge's safety.

Beyond the town, the Osum Gorge — known locally as the Kanioni i Osumit — cuts through southern Albania near the town of Çorovodë, carrying the same Osum river that flows on through Berat. The gorge runs 26 kilometres at an altitude of around 450 metres and is thought to have been carved by water erosion over the past two to three million years, its slopes pockmarked by erosion into small caves and rock formations that locals have given fanciful names such as the Cathedral, the Eye and the Demon's Door. In spring, meltwater raises the river enough to navigate the gorge's full length by boat through Class II rapids that require no prior whitewater experience, while by late summer, as the water drops, the gorge is explored on foot instead, with pools and streams along the way offering places to swim. Mediterranean shrubs such as heath and briar keep both banks green through the year, supporting a rich flora and fauna along the gorge's length.

The trip's final stop, the ruins of Apollonia, lie on the right bank of the Aoös–Vjosë river in Fier county, close to the village of Pojan and roughly 10 kilometres from the Adriatic coast. Founded around 600 BC by Greek colonists from Corinth and, most likely, Corcyra, the settlement grew from a trading post established by Illyrian invitation into an independent polis, and Aristotle later described its government as a narrow oligarchy in which a small elite descended from the original colonists ruled over a largely local Illyrian population. The city was known before its founding as Gylakeia, after its founder Gylax, and only took the name Apollonia — a reference to the god Apollo — around 588 BC, distinguishing itself from two dozen other cities of the same name across the Greek world by the epithet "towards Epidamnos," the nearby Corcyrean colony.

Apollonia's fortunes shifted with Rome: from the second century BC it allied with the Roman Republic, which kept a legionary base there, and the city flourished as home to a renowned school of Greek philosophy, rhetoric and military training that drew students from across the Roman world. At its Hellenistic peak the city held an estimated 60,000 people, its position as a river port giving it command of a plain stretching some 10 kilometres, and the geographer Strabo described it as a well-governed, self-governing polis. Today the site sits within the county of Fier, its ruins spread across the hillside above the Vjosë valley, the closing stop on a route that has already carried the traveller from a Byzantine-Ottoman citadel through an Ottoman stone bridge and a river gorge cut over millions of years.

• Berat Castle — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Gorica Bridge — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Osum Canyon — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Apollonia (Illyria) — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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