Berat

Berat is a hillside that looks back at you: on the north bank of the Osum, the Ottoman houses of Mangalem climb the slope in tiers, each one a white cube with a broad row of windows in its upper floor, until the whole hill is a face of a thousand eyes; across the river, reached by a stone bridge of seven arches, Gorica answers with the same windows on the same slope; and above Mangalem, on the ridge, the Kala is a castle that has never stopped being a neighbourhood — families live inside the walls, among a dozen Byzantine churches and the museum of Onufri, the sixteenth-century painter whose red nobody has matched. Behind everything stands Mount Tomorr, sacred to Bektashi and Christians both, and thirty kilometres south the Osum has cut a canyon that the rafts run in spring.

The traveller crosses the bridge at dawn, when the windows catch the first light, and back at dusk, when they catch the last; climbs through Mangalem's lanes to the Kala and spends the morning inside — the churches, the cisterns, the Onufri icons, the view of the river bending away; comes down for lunch by the water; walks the boulevard at six with the whole town, in the ritual of the xhiro, back and forth, greeting; drinks a raki, then the wine of Çobo, made in the hills nearby; and, with a second day, takes the canyon by raft between April and June, or walks its rim the rest of the year.

The Guide's honesty: Berat is small, honest and still cheap, and Albania is discovering itself as a destination faster than its roads are catching up — the drive from Tirana takes two hours on a good day, and the buses are minibuses that leave when full —; the Kala's cobbles are steep and polished by five centuries — flat shoes, and mind the descent —; the guesthouses in Mangalem and Gorica are the way to sleep, and the families who run them will feed you until you protest; the canyon rafting is a real river in spring and a walk in August; and a xhiro is not a stroll — it is the town's daily parliament, and you are welcome to attend, slowly.