Berat, Albania: Ottoman Houses, Hillside Urbanism and the City of a Thousand Windows

Seen from the banks of the Osum River, the old town of Berat, Albania, looks less like a collection of buildings than a single wall of windows. Whitewashed houses step up the slope beneath a hilltop citadel, each row of large, evenly spaced windows looking out over the roofs of the row below, which is why the town became known, in the words of ICOMOS’s 2008 evaluation for UNESCO, as the “town of a thousand windows”. What shaped this hillside, and what does it reveal about how an Ottoman-era town of craftsmen and merchants organised itself on difficult ground? On Day 15 of our small group Balkans tour from Dubrovnik to Kotor, the group arrives in Berat for a guided walking tour of its citadel.

Why Berat, Albania matters on a Balkans route

Berat is not simply a picturesque stop between North Macedonia and the Albanian coast. It is one of the places in the Balkans where a whole sequence of history can be read in a single townscape: a fortified hilltop occupied since prehistory, medieval churches inside its walls, mosques and a Sufi lodge from the Ottoman centuries, and residential quarters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spilling down to the river. UNESCO’s World Heritage listing describes Berat as bearing witness to the coexistence of religious and cultural communities over many centuries, and singles it out for “peaceful coexistence with a large Christian minority”.

That combination is what makes the town worth reading closely rather than simply admiring. The houses are what catch the eye in Berat, but they make full sense when read alongside the citadel above them, the river below and the trade routes that brought craftsmen and merchants to the valley. For the broader sweep of the country’s past, from the Illyrians to the twentieth century, our article on uncovering Albania’s history sets out the national story that this article leaves aside.

A town built around a gorge

The shape of Berat begins with its geology. ICOMOS’s 2008 evaluation describes how the Osum River “has cut a deep gorge through the limestone rock in the valley to form a natural promontory”, around which the town was built on several river terraces, on the slopes and on the opposite side of the valley. The same report places the town on the Osum between the mountain of Tomorri to the east and the valley of Myzeqe to the west, some 50 kilometres from the Adriatic.

The result is a town in three parts, and the UNESCO core zone follows them exactly. The Castle of Berat, known locally as the Kala, occupies the hilltop on the north bank. The Mangalem quarter sits at the foot of the castle hill, its houses built on terraces rising from the river. Across the Osum, on the south bank, lies the Gorica quarter beneath its own fortress. The report notes that the protected core of 58.9 hectares includes all three quarters, the green areas between them and the bridge across the river, and that the general planning concept of the town, “including green zones between the built areas”, has been well preserved.

This is hillside urbanism in the literal sense. Streets follow the contours or climb them in steps; houses are fitted to terraces rather than to a grid; and the open spaces between the quarters are part of the design, not leftover ground. The pattern is easy to see from the riverbank, and it explains why the town looks the way it does from every angle.

The Kala: a citadel with a long memory

ICOMOS describes the castle hill as the oldest part of the town, and records that it has been continuously inhabited since the Neolithic, and UNESCO dates the origins of the castle itself to the 4th century BC. In antiquity the town was known as Antipatreia, a fortified centre that resisted the Roman legions for a time and is mentioned by Polybius and Livy. In the Byzantine period it took the name Pulcheriopolis, after the fifth-century Empress Pulcheria, and its fortifications were rebuilt.

The medieval layers followed. The 2008 evaluation notes a period of Bulgarian rule between 860 and 1018, records that the name Berat first appears in 1018, and explains that from the thirteenth century onward the town passed through the hands of several rulers, including the Angevins, the Serbs and the Albanian Muzakaj princes. Much of the fortification system was rebuilt in the thirteenth century, when it took on its present general form, and UNESCO describes the castle as one “most of which was built in the 13th century”.

The plan of the citadel reflects its defensive role. The report describes a castle of triangular plan, roughly 200 by 100 metres, at the top of the hill, within an outer circuit of walls measuring around 600 metres from north to south and 300 metres from east to west. Under Ottoman rule, which UNESCO dates from 1417, the fortifications were repaired and new towers added. After an uprising against Ottoman authority in 1834 the castle was damaged and lost its defensive function, but it kept much of its historic fabric.

Is the Berat citadel still lived in?

Yes. The 2008 ICOMOS evaluation describes housing inside the citadel walls, dating mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and classifies the World Heritage property as two inhabited historic towns. Houses, lanes and churches share the space inside the walls, so a walk through the Kala passes through a residential neighbourhood as well as a monument.

Churches and icons inside the walls

Inside the walls, the citadel is the heart of Christian Berat. According to the 2008 evaluation, the citadel area once had 20 Byzantine churches, many from the thirteenth century, generally simple in form and often built on a nearly square plan. Among the monuments the nomination lists as of outstanding value are the Church of St Mary of Vlaherna, from the thirteenth century, the Church of the Holy Trinity, from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, and the Cathedral of St Mary of the Annunciation, a thirteenth-century building restored in 1747.

Several of these churches contain wall paintings and icons, and Berat is closely associated with one painter in particular. The evaluation’s brief description of the property notes that the wall paintings of Berat’s medieval churches “have won great renown, especially for the 16th century painting school established by Onufri”. The point matters for how the town is read: under Ottoman rule, Orthodox Christian art in Berat did not simply survive, it developed, with icon painting and manuscript illumination continuing alongside the town’s growing Muslim community.

The town’s religious heritage extends to its manuscripts. The same report mentions the Codex Beratinus, Gospel manuscripts that it dates to the sixth and ninth centuries, which were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in 2005.

Mangalem and Gorica: the town below the walls

For much of its history, Berat’s people lived inside the citadel. ICOMOS records that this changed under the Ottomans, when the town, lying on a major communication route between the Ottoman capital and the Adriatic, grew prosperous and spread beyond its fortifications. Its quarters took on their present-day form during this period: the Kala on the hill, Mangalem at its foot, and Gorica on the opposite bank.

The two lower quarters face each other across the river, and the 2008 evaluation notes that “on either side of the river, housing has developed in two separate quarters, Mangalem and Gorica, whose urban morphologies have been preserved over the centuries”. Mangalem’s houses are stacked on terraces up the slope towards the castle, producing the wall of windows that gave Berat its nickname. Gorica, on the south bank, climbs the opposite hillside, where the report places the fortress of Gorica and its quarter.

A bridge links them. ICOMOS considers that the Gorica Bridge over the Osum dates back to the late Ottoman period, in the eighteenth century, and recommended that it be added to the town’s list of remarkable properties; the bridge lies within the World Heritage core zone. Standing on it, the logic of the town becomes clear: the river is the spine, the quarters face each other across it, and the citadel watches over both.

Reading the houses of the City of a Thousand Windows

The houses are the reason Berat is known as the City of a Thousand Windows, and they reward a closer look. The 2008 evaluation describes the housing as “of great architectural homogeneity, using numerous large and regularly spaced windows”, and UNESCO characterises Berat’s houses as “tiered houses on the slopes”, mainly from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that are largely horizontal in layout and make abundant use of daylight.

Their form is partly a story of rebuilding. The 2008 evaluation records that many houses were damaged in a serious earthquake in 1851, which destroyed their upper storeys. Before the earthquake the buildings had been built entirely in stone; in the reconstruction, the upper floors were rebuilt in timber while the surviving stone ground floors were kept. That combination of a solid stone base and a lighter, whitewashed upper storey, opened up with windows, is what gives the hillside its characteristic two-tone look.

The report also sets out the main house types. There are houses with a çardak, a front gallery, which it assigns to the period from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries; closed houses; and buildings with special architectural solutions. The nomination also lists the houses of the Simsia, Haxhistasa, Kolovani, Vrohoriti, Xhymyrteka and Aguridhi families, built between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for both residential and commercial use, among the monuments of particular value.

Two features stand out in the expert assessments. The first is light. In its justification of the listing, ICOMOS records the nomination’s argument that the Ottoman house in Berat is unusual “because of its openness to light and its creativity of adaptation to the demands of the rocky terrain”. On a steep slope, stepping each house above its neighbour gives every row an unobstructed outlook over the roofs below, and the long runs of windows take full advantage of it. The second is uniformity. The nomination argued, as the evaluation records, that “there is no specific feature of vernacular architecture which is characteristically Christian or Muslim” in Berat, and that the architectural and morphological unity of the town suggests no distinction between Christian and Muslim housing. The houses, in other words, express a shared urban culture of artisans and merchants rather than a divided one.

Mosques, a tekke and Ottoman urbanism

The Ottoman centuries added a new layer of public buildings to the lower town. ICOMOS records that after 1417 a majority of the population converted to Islam and several mosques were built. Among the earlier ones it names the Red Mosque, built in the fifteenth century by Sultan Bayezid and later reduced to ruins. The Leaden Mosque, built in the sixteenth century by the Skuraj family of local lords, is distinguished by its decorative cloisonné technique. In Mangalem stands the Bachelors’ Mosque, dated in the same report to 1827.

Berat also has buildings used by Sufi brotherhoods. The 2008 evaluation singles out the Helveti tekke, built at the end of the eighteenth century in finely carved stone with rich interior decoration, as one of the town’s important Islamic monuments. Set against the churches of the citadel, these buildings support UNESCO’s reading of the town: Christian and Muslim monuments stand close to one another, constructed or restored, as the evaluation puts it, between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Berat’s Ottoman buildings are provincial works rather than imperial commissions, but they belong to the same architectural world as the great mosques and palaces of the empire’s heartland, which our article on Ottoman art, mosques and palaces explores. What makes Berat distinctive is how this architecture sits within the town. ICOMOS describes Berat as primarily a town of craftsmen and merchants rather than a military centre dependent on a central authority, with defences that served the town and its inhabitants, and an urban space that “remains open, and is interspersed with green zones”. UNESCO’s summary of the site makes the same point, describing a town that was fortified but open and long inhabited by craftsmen and merchants.

From museum-town to World Heritage Site

The protection of Berat’s historic fabric has a long history of its own. According to the 2008 evaluation, the first Albanian protective order, dated 16 October 1948, listed the castle, the bridge over the Osum, four churches and a mosque as monuments of national value. A government decree of 2 June 1961 declared Berat a national historic centre and museum-town, raising the number of first-category monuments in the town to 50, many of them private houses. From 1965 the Albanian Institute of Cultural Monuments ran an annual programme of maintenance and restoration. The report notes that conservation was neglected during the 1990s as a result of the political transition, before a five-year plan was set up for 2007 to 2011.

International recognition came in two stages. The Museum-City of Gjirokastra, in the Drinos valley of southern Albania, was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2005. In 2008 the World Heritage Committee approved Berat as an extension of that listing (decision 32 COM 8B.56), creating the serial property known as the Historic Centres of Berat and Gjirokastra, inscribed under criteria (iii) and (iv). ICOMOS framed the two towns as complementary: Gjirokastra as a fortress town of tall, fortified houses built by powerful landowners, Berat as a long-inhabited town of craft and commerce given over to private housing.

The listing also came with cautions. UNESCO notes that illegal constructions in the late 1990s adversely affected the integrity of the two towns, and that preservation management must be stepped up and carefully enforced. Berat is, in other words, a living town whose historic character depends on continued care.

How does the tour reach Berat?

The group arrives from Ohrid on Day 15. The tour page describes leaving Ohrid along the route of the ancient Roman road, the Via Egnatia, passing into Albania and travelling up over the mountains, with a stop at Mirake to see an ancient bridge that is possibly Roman, and a stop at Elbasan, a staging post on the road, to see the castle and eat lunch within its grounds. After arriving in Berat, the group takes a guided walking tour of the citadel. Before this, the group is based in Ohrid from Day 12 to Day 14, the setting of our article on Lake Ohrid and its lakeside town.

How much walking does the Berat citadel tour involve?

The tour page does not give a distance for the citadel walk, so expect hill walking. The castle stands on a hilltop above the river, and 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. If you would like to talk through what this means for you, a Tour Specialist can help.

Where does the route go after Berat?

On Day 16 the group drives to the coast to visit the Roman port town of Apollonia, passing communist-era fortifications on the way, including an extensive concrete tunnel network built for defence, before continuing to Tirana, where some free time is allowed on arrival. From Albania the route goes on to its finale in Kotor, Montenegro. For the wider context of the region the tour crosses, our guide to touring the Balkans, from Albania to North Macedonia sets the scene.

Berat in the wider Balkan story

Berat is easy to reduce to a postcard: white houses, a castle, a river. Read closely, it is something more useful to the traveller, a compact lesson in how a Balkan town grew over more than two thousand years. The hilltop fortress records the ancient and medieval powers that held the valley; the churches and their painted interiors show an Orthodox culture that continued to flourish under Ottoman rule; the mosques and tekke mark the Ottoman centuries; and the terraced houses of Mangalem and Gorica show how a society of craftsmen and merchants adapted a shared architectural language to a steep and difficult site.

Arriving after a day on the road from Ohrid, mature travellers in a small group of up to 16 travellers explore the citadel on a guided walk, with the river quarters of Mangalem and Gorica spread out below the walls. It is the moment when the window-lined hillside stops being a view and becomes a history you can read.