History & culture
Gjirokastër reads in layers. Start at the top, with the town you'll walk through today, and dig down.
Draft. drawn only from facts elsewhere on this site, still under review.
The City of Stone
Today
A UNESCO World Heritage city of slate roofs, stone houses and a castle over the valley.
Monuments and a tunnel
Communist era
The Obelisk, perched atop the old town, is a monument to education and the first Albanian school in the city, erected in 1968.
Beneath the cobblestone streets runs the Cold War Tunnel, built in the 1970s under Enver Hoxha's regime, with meeting chambers, offices and sleeping quarters.
The Ethnographic Museum stands in the birthplace of Enver Hoxha, and the castle holds Cold War artifacts, including a preserved military plane, alongside the National Arms Museum.
Chronicles in stone
Writers
Ismail Kadare was born and spent his childhood in a house built in 1799, a Cultural Monument since 1991 and now a public museum. It inspired his book Chronicle in Stone.
"Muza Ime" is a cultural space dedicated to Musine Kokalari, Albania's first published female writer and a symbol of intellectual resistance, in a restored traditional home.
Sokaku i të Marrëve, the Alley of the Madmen, is wrapped in local legend, honoring eccentric poets and unconventional thinkers.
Stone houses, a mosque and a bridge
18th & 19th centuries
The Bazaar Mosque, in the heart of the historic bazaar, dates from the mid-18th century.
Skënduli House is a meticulously preserved 18th-century house with 4 hamams, 9 fireplaces and 12 decorated ceilings, plus double walls for privacy and insulation. Zekate House, built in 1812, rises three stone stories with wood-carved ceilings and colorful frescoes.
Outside town, Ali Pasha's Bridge is a stone bridge of early 19th-century engineering, once part of an aqueduct supplying Ali Pasha's fortress.
Antigonea
Antiquity
14 kilometers from Gjirokastër lies Antigonea, an ancient city founded in the 3rd century BCE by King Pyrrhus of Epirus and named after his wife. It was destroyed in the Roman conquest of 167 BCE, and its remnants remain to explore.
