Hiking in Albania / Financial Times

An old friend, Virtyt Gacaferri, emailed me from Kosovo. Come hiking in Albania, he said. He’d discovered a new trail - four days and 40 miles up a remote southern valley. We’d stay with villagers. There would be spectacular scenery, amazing churches, hot springs and finally, he promised, “a city with streets so steep you could hang your hat on top of a minaret”.

Albania? It is one of Europe’s poorest countries. A third of its population lives abroad. All winter I’d been reading about its criminal gangs, people traffickers and hordes of illegal immigrants crossing the English Channel in small boats. Virtyt had form, however. In 2017 he had organised a wonderful hike along the border of Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo in the Accursed Mountains.

And so, on the first official day of spring, some friends and I flew to Tirana just as Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, arrived in London to meet Rishi Sunak. The joke was that he, too, was going to seek asylum in the UK. Over the following days, however, my perception of Albania and Albanians changed dramatically.

Virtyt met us at the airport with an amusing, irrepressible and endlessly resourceful guide, Arben Kola, who readily admitted that he had three times entered Britain illegally in or under lorries.

As we headed south we stopped en route for our first taste of an Albania very different from the stereotype: Apollonia, a former Greek then Roman hilltop settlement abandoned after fifth-century earthquakes diverted the course of a nearby river, rendering it inaccessible to the sea. 

In serene late afternoon sunshine we had the ruins to ourselves, and Arben persuaded the site’s resident archaeologist, Arjan Dimo, to open the small museum with its impressive collection of vases, jewellery and statuary. Pride of place went to a magnificent sandalled foot, made of bronze, that Dimo had found himself.

It was dark by the time we reached Peshtan, the village where our hike would start. Our van crunched up a dirt track and deposited us outside a clean, simple guesthouse where Valentina and Viktor Goliku welcomed us with a blazing fire, glasses of raki and a veritable feast of roast chicken, byrek (flaky pastry filled with cheese and spinach) and home-made wine.

The bigger surprise came the next morning. The rising sun revealed forested mountains all around and, far below, the gorge of the turquoise Vjosa river. Rising in Greece and 170 miles long, the Vjosa is one of Europe’s last untamed, undammed rivers. Albania’s government has just declared it a national park.

We breakfasted off homemade pickles, jams and cheeses on a terrace overlooking this majestic scenery, then donned our backpacks and set off not up the Vjosa valley, but the valley of one of its tributaries, the Zagori, site of a ferocious six-month battle between Greeks and Italians in World War Two. 

On the edge of Peshtan a villager, Mira Muka, showed us a remarkable collection of rusting rifles, helmets, bayonets, shells and mess tins that she and her husband had found in the surrounding hills. There were still plenty of live munitions lying about, she added encouragingly.

As we climbed the steep path out of Peshtan the snowy peak of Mount Strakavecit appeared before us, and would remain our lodestar all day long. Beneath a cloudless sky we hiked through pristine beech forests just breaking into leaf and past meadows strewn with early spring flowers. We crossed streams, and filled our water bottles from springs. We lunched in warm sunshine off bread, tomatoes and goats’ cheese. We savoured a silence unbroken by a single combustion engine. We met only a solitary goatherd, his appearance heralded by the tinkling of his animals’ bells. 

In the afternoon we passed an old stone house whose owner, Ilir Korro, offered us coffee, raki and spoonfuls of thick honey from his bee hives. He kept cows, too. He slaughtered them himself, and carried the meat to Peshtan on a horse.

Soon afterwards, we descended to the river and another surprise - a 19th-century Ottoman-era stone bridge with a single elegant, cobbled arch. It was a work of art in the wilderness, seemingly serving no one but us.

From the river we wearily climbed a last, long hillside to Limar, a village scented by animal dung and far from any road. There we spent the night at the home of Mani Damani, the beaming village schoolteacher, and learned how the region’s beauty was tinged with sadness.

Mani’s house, like the rest of Limar, was built entirely of stone from the surrounding hillsides. We ate lamb, cheese, curds and vegetables produced on his land. We drank wine from his vines, tea from mountain berries, and home-made raki. We were warmed by a stove fuelled with wood from the forest. But Mani’s way of life, long vanished elsewhere in Europe, will soon disappear here too. Limar’s population had shrunk from 100 families 30 years ago to just 15 now, he explained. As in all the other villages we passed through, the younger generations had left for Tirana or, more likely, emigrated. 

We woke the next morning to the sound of crowing roosters, bleating lambs and cow bells. Before leaving, we visited Mani’s dilapidated two-roomed school. It had just two pupils left.

The second day was as sublime as the first, the sky once again an unblemished blue. We left Strakavecit behind, but the valley ahead was flanked by yet more snow-capped mountains - the lair of bears, wolves, boar and the rare Balkan lynx. We forded streams and carefully negotiated the winter’s landslips. We bathed aching feet in the river. Arben demonstrated an extraordinary ability to whistle bird songs, drawing replies from nearby buzzards. 

At noon we reached Doshnice, reputedly one of the most isolated villages left in Europe. As we wandered down its cobbled alleys, past rudimentary animal pens, a woman offered us coffee and walnuts in her shaded garden. The nearest proper road was a two hour walk away, she said. Of the 30 families that lived in Doshnice in the 1990s, just seven remained. There were no children left.

Late that afternoon a cacophony of barking dogs welcomed us to the village of Hoshteva. There we discovered an Albanian Orthodox church built in 1843 that had somehow survived the atheist regime of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Communist dictator from 1944 to 1985. He destroyed more than 2,000 other churches and mosques as he turned his country into Europe’s North Korea.

The church’s dark interior was astonishing. Every wall, every pillar, its domed ceiling and even its towering pulpit was covered in frescoes. The caretaker said villagers had continued secretly to worship there during Hoxha’s rule. The punishment, if caught, was imprisonment.  

We also encountered a problem in Hoshteva: the sole guest house had not yet opened after the winter. With nowhere to stay, we had to abandon the hike’s third day. We instead bumped ten miles along a dirt track in an ancient Mercedes to our next guest house in the village of Sheper. 

By now we were nearing the head of the Zagori valley and the Greek border. It was time to cross a 5,000-foot pass to the north and back into the Vjosa valley. We hired a horse for our backpacks and early the next morning began our long ascent past two of the 170,000 concrete pillboxes that Hoxha, in his paranoia, erected to defend Albania from invasion. At one point our muleteer dexterously grafted twigs he had cut from a domesticated cherry tree onto the lopped-off branches of a wild one so it would produce edible fruit in future years.

At the top, high above the treeline, we found a great bowl of snow-fringed Alpine meadow where shepherds would soon bring their animals to graze on the lush summer grass. We munched dried figs and enjoyed stupendous views of mountain peaks to north, south, east and west.

Going down was less fun. The track was steep and covered in loose shale. It took hours to reach the bottom, but rewards awaited us. One was to soak in the thermal springs which bubble from rocks below another beautiful Ottoman bridge in the Langarica Canyon. The other was a night and sumptuous dinner in a splendid 120-year-old farmhouse with yard-thick walls and ancient wooden doors owned by Kristaq and Florinda Cullufe.

The family’s rich ancestral farmland beside the Vjosa was confiscated by Hoxha, and the Cullufes had moved to the nearby town of Permat to do menial jobs. For more than two decades they returned each Sunday to shore up the house until finally, in 2017, they reopened it as a guest house. “I don’t travel to see the world,” Kristaq said as we dined on a balcony overlooking the Vjosa valley. “My goal is to bring the world here.”    

Losing a day’s hiking was a shame, but it did give us more time to explore an area little known - indeed, long barred - to the outside world.

We spent two happy hours wandering all by ourselves amongst the impressive ruins of Byllis, an ancient Roman city built on a mountaintop with yet more stunning views over the Vjosa.

South of Gjirokaster we drove up a dirt track and found ourselves equally alone in the ancient Roman theatre of Hadrianopolis, excavated scarcely 20 years ago, its tranquillity disturbed only by farmers ploughing the surrounding fields.

And then there was Gjirokaster itself, an Ottoman-era city and Unesco World Heritage Site with narrow cobbled streets tumbling down a vertiginous mountainside. It is also the birthplace of both Hoxha and Ismail Kadare, Albania’s best-known novelist, who wrote those words about “hanging your hat on a minaret”.

Arben talked our way into the 1,500-year-old fortress overlooking the city, though it was officially closed that day. We explored the labyrinthine nuclear bunker built beneath the city hall in Hoxha’s time to protect Gjirokaster’s Communist officials. We visited one of the wonderful old merchant’s houses whose owner, Nesip Skenduli, was the ninth successive generation of his family to live in it. Hoxha was a school friend of his father’s, he said, but later imprisoned him for 13 years and forced the Skendulis to share their home with seven other families. 

The relics of Hoxta’s brutal rule are chilling but fascinating. Driving back to Tirana we stopped to explore a long abandoned labour camp at Tepelena. Where cows now graze amid the ruined buildings hundreds of men, women and children died from torture, disease or starvation. We could just make out the words ‘Rrofte (‘Viva’) Enver Hoxha’ painted on the gatehouse.

On Tirana’s edge we inspected the inconspicuous grave to which Hoxha’s remains were moved following the communism’s collapse. In the capital itself we toured the House of Leaves, former headquarters of Hoxha’s secret police, which displays in harrowing detail the methods and equipment the Sigurimi used to crush all resistance.

Tireless to the last, Arben rushed us round one final horror early on the morning of our departure: the vast, subterranean nuclear bunker Hoxha built at the base of a mountain on Tirana’s eastern fringe in the 1970s. Its 106 rooms were designed to protect the top regime officials and their families and included an entire suite for Hoxha himself. So thick are the concrete walls of this monument to a deluded dictator that it will doubtless outlast Albania’s many Roman settlements.

Rushing to the airport, we passed unmistakable reminders of modern Albania’s less savoury side - glitzy new buildings constructed with dodgy cash and an inordinate number of flashy new cars. Yet we had experienced nothing but warmth and generosity in a country that may be ravaged by emigration, but is blessed with abundant natural beauty and historical interest.