Albania's city of stone — Ottoman tower houses, a dictator's birthplace, and the National Folklore Festival
Gjirokastër is one of the best-preserved Ottoman towns in the Balkans — a UNESCO-listed 'museum city' built on a steep hillside above the Drinos River Valley, where the traditional kulla (tower houses) are constructed entirely from local grey limestone. It is also the birthplace of both Enver Hoxha, Albania's communist dictator, and Ismail Kadare, Albania's greatest novelist — a coincidence that says much about the city's turbulent complexity. The castle above the town contains a captured American spy plane from 1957.
Gjirokastër grew to prominence in the 18th century under the bey Ali Pasha of Ioannina, who used it as an administrative capital. The Ottoman character was preserved partly by isolation — the mountain location meant no industrialisation that destroyed comparable towns elsewhere. UNESCO inscribed it in 2005 alongside Berat as an exceptional example of Ottoman Balkan domestic architecture. Ismail Kadare's memoir 'Chronicle in Stone' recreates growing up here during World War II, when the city was occupied in sequence by Italian, German, Greek, and Yugoslav troops.