Apollonia, Albania: A Roman Port City Between Adriatic Trade and Inland Roads

From the hill of Apollonia, Albania, the Adriatic is a thin bright line on the horizon, far beyond a plain of fields and drainage canals. It is not where you would expect to find a port. Yet this was a city that Cicero called “a great and important city”, that Strabo placed at the head of the Roman road to the east, and where the young Octavian, the future Augustus, was studying when news came of Julius Caesar’s murder. Apollonia was founded as a Greek colony, flourished as an ally and city of Rome, and was served by a river harbour whose channel has since shifted away across the plain. How did a port end up inland, and what does the site reveal about trade between the Adriatic and the roads into the Balkans? On Day 16 of our small group Balkans tour from Dubrovnik to Kotor, the group drives to the coast to find out.

Why Apollonia, Albania belongs on a Balkans route

Most of the places on a Balkans itinerary are read through their medieval and Ottoman layers. Apollonia takes the story further back, to the centuries when the eastern Adriatic shore was a meeting ground between Greek settlers, the Illyrian peoples of the interior and, from the third century BC, Rome. The site sits on the hills above the plain of the Vjosë, the ancient Aoös, in the Fier district of south-western Albania, and Albania’s Ministry of Culture placed “The Ancient City of Apollonia” on UNESCO’s Tentative List in April 2014. That is a step towards a possible World Heritage nomination, not an inscription, and the submission argues that the city offers evidence of Greek and Illyrian coexistence and of ancient urban culture.

What makes Apollonia rewarding is less any single monument than the way the site explains movement: ships coming up a river from the sea, goods moving inland, and a road heading east towards ancient Macedonia and Thessalonica. For Albania’s longer story, from the Illyrians to the modern state, our guide to uncovering Albania’s history provides the national background that this article leaves aside.

A Greek colony on Illyrian ground

The ancient writers agreed on the founders. Strabo, writing his Geography around the turn of the era, describes Apollonia as “an exceedingly well-governed city, founded by the Corinthians and the Corcyraeans” (Corcyra being the island of Corfu), in the Loeb translation by H. L. Jones. Albania’s 2014 Tentative List submission follows the same tradition: it states that the city was founded during the first half of the sixth century BC by Greek colonists from Corfu and Corinth, led, according to tradition, by Gylax, who gave it the name Gylakeia before it became Apollonia. The date is not fixed beyond debate; a geomorphological study carried out within the French–Albanian archaeological mission describes the site as occupied from the seventh century BC.

The colonists did not arrive in an empty land. The submission places the city in the territory of the Taulantii, one of the Illyrian peoples, and Strabo lists the Taulantii among the tribes living inland of Epidamnus and Apollonia. The UNESCO entry presents the city’s Greek character as shaped by these local influences, and it bases its case for the site on that coexistence as much as on its Greek architecture. Over time the settlement grew into a substantial walled city: the submission describes an area of about 81 hectares enclosed by a wall some three kilometres long and three metres wide.

Ten stadia from the river: reading Apollonia’s port

The phrase “Roman port city” needs some unpacking, because Apollonia was never a harbour town on an open beach. Strabo is precise about its position. He places it on the Aoös, “ten stadia distant from the river and sixty from the sea”. In other words, the city stood back from the water on its hills, and its harbour was on the river.

Modern fieldwork has given that description a physical shape. In a study published around 2001 and carried out within the French–Albanian archaeological mission at Apollonia, then directed by Pierre Cabanes, the geomorphologist Eric Fouache and Albanian colleagues (Gjiovalin Gruda, Skender Muçaj, Pal Nikolli and Llazar Dimo) used satellite imagery and old maps to trace abandoned river channels across the plain. They identified a former course of the Vjosë running in meanders 720 metres west of the south gate of the city’s rampart, and noted that a large quantity of stone blocks had come to light at that point when an irrigation canal was dug. Taking these together with Strabo’s ten stadia, they proposed locating Apollonia’s river port there.

Their reconstruction also explains how ships reached it. According to the study, vessels coming in from the Adriatic had to cross the offshore sand bar through a gap, possibly pass across a lagoon, and then work up the river through several meanders. The authors connect this with the ancient accounts of fighting on the Aoös, including Livy’s description of Philip V of Macedon, who had come to besiege Apollonia, being forced to beach or burn his ships and retreat overland when Roman warships blocked the river mouth. On this reading, Apollonia’s harbour was reached by river, not built on the open shore.

Is Apollonia on the coast?

No. Fouache and his colleagues note that from the promontory of Apollonia the sea is visible about 10 kilometres away, across a plain largely made up of land reclaimed from marshes from 1950 onwards. They reconstruct the ancient shoreline at roughly five kilometres from the city, and suggest that Strabo’s sixty stadia may have been measured along the winding river rather than in a straight line. The largest changes to the coast, in their account, came after the fourteenth century, so through antiquity the city enjoyed broadly stable conditions for navigation.

Rome’s partner on the Adriatic

Rome’s formal role at Apollonia began with an alliance rather than a conquest. Polybius describes how, in the war against the Illyrians, Roman naval and land forces joined up at Apollonia, and how the people of the city agreed to place themselves under Roman protection. The Tentative List submission dates the beginning of Roman rule to 229 BC and describes the following centuries as a period of “grandeur and splendor”.

Position mattered here too. Strabo writes that “from Apollonia to Macedonia one travels the Egnatian Road, towards the east”, and that travellers setting out from Apollonia and from Epidamnus (later Dyrrachium, modern Durrës) met at an equal distance along the same road. The city was therefore one of the western heads of the Roman route that ran on towards Thessalonica; the road itself, and the stretch the tour follows on Day 15, is the subject of our article on the Via Egnatia across the Balkans.

Apollonia’s trade can also be traced in its coins. Its silver drachms carried a cow suckling a calf on the obverse and a double stellate pattern on the reverse; the numismatist Gyula Petrányi, writing in the journal Abjadiyat in 2010, argues that most of them were struck after the Third Illyrian War of 168 BC and that production ended with the civil war of 49 to 48 BC. He notes that the majority of the late coins have been found in numerous hoards in the north-east Balkans, far inland, where they appear to have filled a gap left by scarce Roman denarii.

The city’s best-known Roman episode belongs to the end of the Republic. Suetonius records that the young Octavian, sent ahead to Apollonia while Julius Caesar planned campaigns against the Dacians and Parthians, “devoted his leisure to study” there, and that it was at Apollonia that he learned his great-uncle had been killed and that he was Caesar’s heir. Suetonius adds that Octavian took his teacher of declamation, Apollodorus of Pergamon, with him to Apollonia, and that he and Agrippa visited the astrologer Theogenes there. The UNESCO submission goes further, saying that Octavian studied and underwent military training in the city’s Academy, accompanied by Agrippa. How Octavian went on to become Augustus is told in our guide to Rome’s emperors, from Augustus onwards.

Cicero supplied a much-quoted description. In his Eleventh Philippic, warning the Senate that Gaius Antonius held Apollonia, he calls it magnam urbem et gravem, a great and important city.

The monuments of the city centre

The Tentative List submission lists the monuments that give the site its character: the temenos, the sacred area around the Temple of Apollo; the agora; a theatre; stoas; a building it calls the Buleterion; an odeon; and houses paved with mosaics. It dates the stoas and the theatre to the fourth and third centuries BC, and describes the Buleterion as one of the civic buildings added during the Roman period. The odeon, it notes, combines Greek and Roman construction techniques.

Among the structures excavated at Apollonia is a long portico with a row of niches. A 2007 study of the upper city by a French–Albanian team (Olivier Delouis, Jean-Luc Lamboley, Philippe Lenhardt, François Quantin, Altin Skenderaj, Stéphane Verger and Bashkim Vrekaj, “La ville haute d’Apollonia d’Illyrie”, published in the volume of studies presented to Pierre Cabanes, Épire, Illyrie, Macédoine) records that this portico with 17 niches was uncovered by Léon Rey, the French archaeologist who also excavated the city’s monumental centre. The same study describes that centre as, certainly in the Roman period, one of the main poles of the city’s political, religious and cultural life.

Reading these remains together is a useful way to understand the city. The stoas and theatre belong to the Greek city at its height; the council building and odeon show Roman civic life being added to it; and the mosaic-paved houses show the comfort of private life in a prosperous city.

How much of Apollonia has been excavated?

Only part of it. The Tentative List submission states that the largest part of the city still remains undiscovered, although the archaeological area is described as largely intact and unaffected by modern development. Visitors therefore see the excavated civic centre and selected monuments within a much larger walled area that is still being studied.

Earthquake, river and decline

The same river that served Apollonia also played a part in its decline. The Tentative List submission points to an earthquake in AD 234 that changed the riverbed of the Aoös, and adds that the failure of the existing social structure and the Gothic invasions caused a gradual decline that ended in the city’s total abandonment during the medieval period. With the river shifting away, the advantage that had made the site valuable for centuries was weakened.

The monastery of St Mary

The hill was not left entirely to ruin. Within the archaeological area stands the medieval Monastery of St Mary. The Tentative List submission dates its katholikon, the main church, to the second half of the thirteenth century, while noting that some studies have proposed an earlier date. It highlights the church as a meeting of building traditions, with Byzantine forms combined with Romanesque or Western features in its architecture, sculpture and wall paintings, and it singles out the church’s exonarthex, an outer porch, as unusual in Byzantine architecture.

The monastery is a reminder that the hill was never simply a Greek or Roman ruin. Its medieval church links Apollonia to the Byzantine world explored elsewhere on the route, from the painted churches of Ohrid to the citadel churches of Berat and its hillside quarters, where the group spends the night before Apollonia.

A century of excavation

The modern rediscovery of Apollonia is itself a layered story. The 2007 French–Albanian study of the upper city records that the Austrian archaeologists Camillo Praschniker and Arnold Schober published a plan of the site in 1919. In the years after the First World War, a French mission began work, and Albania’s Culture Minister, as reported by the country’s Media and Information Agency, has described Léon Rey as leading “the first truly scientific archaeological mission in Albania”. Albanian archaeologists continued excavation in later decades, including Albanian–Soviet campaigns on the eastern rampart in 1958 to 1960.

The present phase of international cooperation began in the early 1990s. According to the 2007 study, the French epigraphic and archaeological mission in Albania was founded in 1992 by Pierre Cabanes. Much of what is now understood about the city’s port, its upper town and its shifting landscape comes from this joint French–Albanian work.

When does the tour visit Apollonia?

Apollonia is the Day 16 visit, after the night in Berat. The tour page describes driving to the coast on very small and slow roads to reach the town, passing on the road many of the old communist-era fortifications, including an extensive concrete tunnel network built for defence. There is some free time in Tirana on arrival, before the route continues on Day 17 and finishes in Kotor, Montenegro.

How much walking does a visit to Apollonia involve?

The ruins spread across hills, so expect slopes, steps and uneven ground. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate: participants must be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. The tour page does not give a walking distance for Apollonia itself, so if you would like to talk through what this means for you, a Tour Specialist can help.

Apollonia in the wider Balkan story

Apollonia is easy to misread as a ruin by the sea or as a purely Roman town. Read closely, it is something more interesting: a Greek colony founded on Illyrian land, a partner of Rome that sat at one head of the Egnatian Road, a river port whose harbour depended on the moods of the Aoös, and a hilltop that kept a Christian monastery long after the city had gone. Its landscape has changed so much that the sea it traded across is now a line on the horizon.

For mature travellers in a small group of up to 16 travellers, Apollonia adds the classical chapter to a route otherwise rich in medieval, Ottoman and twentieth-century history. How it fits into the journey as a whole, from Dubrovnik to Kotor, is set out in our overview of the Balkans history tour, from Adriatic ports to Ottoman towns.