Destinations: Butrint, Albania

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Upon hearing that photographer Giovanni Lattanzi and I were planning to visit the Greek isle of Corfu, an archaeologist friend of ours exclaimed, “Oh, good! You’ll be visiting Butrint.”

“Butrint? What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s simply the last major unexcavated archaeological site in the Mediterranean.”

I had already begun imagining a picnic on a remote, sunlit Greek islet, surrounded only by a few scattered stones and perhaps some goats, when our friend added soberly: “It’s in Albania.”

Albania? Just last year, Albania was engulfed in a chaotic and bloody civil war. Pictures of armed civilians clashing with government forces and helicopters airlifting visitors to safety filled the evening news. During the day, anarchy reigned on the streets of the capital, Tirana. At night, those same streets were eerily deserted, the silence punctuated by rounds of gunfire.

Undeterred, we scoured our maps in search of Butrint. We finally learned that Butrint’s remains sit on a bluff in the highlands of southern Albania, only six miles from Corfu.

Known as Buthrotum in ancient times, Butrint is one of archaeology’s lost cities. Yet anyone in the 069ancient Roman world would have recognized the city’s name: Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, supposedly stopped there after the fall of Troy. At one time, Butrint overlooked the entrance to a deep, fjord-like inlet, where Bronze Age sailors sought refuge from stormy seas.

Though legend has it that Butrint was founded by the Trojan prophet Helenus, the city was probably first settled in the eighth century B.C. by traders from Corfu. Attesting to Butrint’s one-time commercial and military might are fortification walls surrounding its ancient acropolis, which sprawls across a small hill. Dating to the sixth century B.C., these walls are preserved to a height of more than six feet in places. By the fourth century B.C., Butrint had blossomed into a major commercial center, with 10,000 residents crowding its streets.

Traders from the eastern Mediterranean dropped their sails here en route to Italy and the northern Adriatic. Commerce brought the city legendary wealth. The Roman poet Virgil (70–19 B.C.) described Butrint in Book III of the Aeneid as a “Troy in miniature,” a town of “spacious colonnades” where the court dined on “plates of gold.” Later, in the second century A.D., the Romans controlled the city and used it as a base from which to launch military attacks into the Balkans. During the next 1,300 years, Butrint was successively ruled by the Goths, Byzantines, Venetians and Turks.

Over the centuries, however, the sea level of the Mediterranean dropped, and Butrint’s harbor became choked with silt. Cut off from the the sea, the city’s great bay became a marshy saltwater lake. Its proud walls, great palace and Greek theater disappeared beneath a thicket of caper plants and shrubs. As nature swamped Butrint, a series of epidemics drove its inhabitants away, and by the 15th century A.D., Butrint had become a ghost town. This once-flourishing city slept undisturbed until the 20th century. Unlike Pompeii, buried by a single, violent eruption of lava, Butrint was buried slowly over the centuries, under the murky silt washing down from the surrounding mountains.

In 1928 Italian archaeologist Count Luigi Ugolini persuaded Benito Mussolini to finance an excavation of Butrint on a grand scale. A city so important to Rome 2,000 years ago should not be 070lost to Fascist Italy. But the onset of World War II put an end to the Italian mission, and Butrint lay untouched for over a decade.

In the 1940s, Albanian archaeologists picked up where the Italians had left off. They uncovered public baths, several temples, the agora and a spectacular amphitheater that could seat as many as 1,500 people. Among the many artifacts found in the theater was the so-called Goddess of Butrint, a fifth-century B.C. statue of a female torso with the head of the Greek god Apollo.

Near the western side of the theater, archaeologists discovered a small Roman shrine dedicated to Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Inside the shrine stood a large headless statue, probably of Asclepius, as well as numerous inscribed vases. Inscriptions scrawled in ancient Greek, describing the liberation of Butrint’s slaves around the fourth century B.C., can be found on the shrine’s western facade. Despite these finds, the site was never fully excavated, and much of it remains buried to this day.

During the Cold War, the rigid communist regime of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s president from 1946 to 1985, locked the country’s doors to outsiders. Hoxha built himself a summer villa near the site and delighted in showing visiting Chinese officials around the ruins, otherwise used only as a pleasant picnic spot for outings from Saranda, a brutally ugly port town a half-hour’s drive away.

Now Butrint is being discovered again—by archaeologists and tourists (25,000 people visited the site in 1995). In l994 the British non-profit Butrint Foundation signed a five-year agreement with the Albanian Institute of Archaeology to excavate and conserve the site and build a visitors’ center.

This year, a British archaeological expedition headed by Richard Hodges will be working at Butrint. Hodges hopes to conduct surveys and clear away the vegetation threatening pavements and walls. Other 071problems await: The marble paving stones of the Greek amphitheater, for example, are awash in seawater. The fragile condition of the site has attracted the attention of the World Monuments Fund, which lists Butrint among its 100 most endangered sites.

Though a good deal of Butrint still remains buried, we encountered many archaeological treasures here from a variety of periods: Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Medieval. We were struck by an early Byzantine baptistry with a stunning mosaic floor embellished with colorful depictions of animals—“the largest and most complex mosaic to have survived in a baptistry from late antiquity,” according to Hodges. Still visible are the 16 granite columns arranged in two concentric circles that supported the roof of the baptistry’s main hall.

Hopefully, with continued funding, diligent excavation and increased tourist interest, Butrint will never again be relegated to archaeology’s Lost and Found.

Upon hearing that photographer Giovanni Lattanzi and I were planning to visit the Greek isle of Corfu, an archaeologist friend of ours exclaimed, “Oh, good! You’ll be visiting Butrint.” “Butrint? What’s that?” I asked. “It’s simply the last major unexcavated archaeological site in the Mediterranean.” I had already begun imagining a picnic on a remote, sunlit Greek islet, surrounded only by a few scattered stones and perhaps some goats, when our friend added soberly: “It’s in Albania.” Albania? Just last year, Albania was engulfed in a chaotic and bloody civil war. Pictures of armed civilians clashing with government forces […]