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| Mountains beyond Gjirokastra |
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| Street in Gjirokastra's old town |
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| November sunshine in Gjirokastra |
From the beautiful city of Gjirokastra our friend Eni, (who set up the tourist agency Experience Gjirokastra) drives us east into the mountains. We follow the river Vjosa, stopping at a riverside restaurant for a meal of traditional Albanian cuisine.
En route to Permet we pass through a small town. I don’t know the name of it but it makes me think of Hana Këlcyrë for I knew her family had lived near Gjirokastra, and I mention her to the others. Eni was just talking about her says S, this is Këlcyrë and that’s the ruins of her house up there.
It’s a stark mountain slope. Just a few straight stacks of what once was a large house, stone fingers like a constant admonition. Hana Këlcyrë’s story is a fascinating one which I’ve written about elsewhere. She was just a child when she left Albania with her family towards the end of WWII, refugees from the communist partisans. I met her in Vienna several years ago. The photo below is of a reproduction she gave me of her family home in 1900. (It was destroyed during WWII.)
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| The town of Këlcyrë today, with house ruins in the background |
The early evening light is saturated with pink and gold from the sky. Everything glows, colours turn deep and dusky, contrasts are blurred; this light is liquid, streaming down the mountain slopes onto the land, the road, the buildings, people’s faces.
When we reach Permet (where there is no crime at all, says Eni) we cross a bridge over the river, which is bordered by parks and trees. There's a large square in the town centre with blocks of buildings round it, restaurants and hotels, with tables and umbrellas at the front. We have coffee outside, looking out on the square. S notices that the buildings of the two political parties (Socialist and Democrat) sit side by side. Yes, says Eni, there is even political harmony here!
The cafe terraces are like modern versions of the cafes of old European cities, of Paris, Vienna or Rome. The mountains remind me of Switzerland a little, but they have a forbidding look to them, like a different life-form ringing this small town in the valley (which boasts, its motto says, that it has everything except the sea).
The light, the glow on the backdrop of mountains, it has a surreal, film-set feel to it. The cafe lights are bright, and, by the time we head back, the bridge over the river has a rope of bright illuminations on either side, regularly spaced like an avenue towards some mansion house or even a chateau, hidden behind a curve in the tree-lined approach. But there are no old historical chateaux, no old mansion houses here (or at least none visible in this modern part of the town). I think about how fortunate Gjirokastra is, to have preserved so much of its architectural heritage. Yet many of its old buildings were destroyed too, in bombing raids in WWII, like Hana's ancestral family home; all that remains of it now, just a few stone stacks pointing up into the sky.
As we drive back to Gjirokastra the avenue of lights over the bridge takes us into a shaky past, darkness mostly, only a few houses or habitations once outside the town, and these only faintly illuminated. I cannot imagine people climbing those mountains, I can't imagine any kind of traffic between people and these scaly stony slopes. But there will be paths, somewhere out of sight, I know this and it is reassuring. There will be paths to cross these mountains, shepherds and goatherds will know them, but for most other people, only when there is a need or purpose to cross them. (As in times of war – the Balkan wars, the two world wars, when groups of the resistance fighters camped out in the mountains and could evade the enemy because of their knowledge of these secret paths.)
Over the bridge and into the darkness we pass quite a few people walking along the road – mainly older men – but the road is not designed for pedestrians and sometimes they are hard to see, in their dark suits. This mountain darkness, with no street lights and few car headlights, is intense. Where were they going I wondered, walking along a road in the darkness? For outside the town there don't seem to be any habitations or very few, no lights of houses or smallholdings, just the mountains, with a sprinkling of lights up the mountain-slopes, showing that some people live there. But there would be houses, unlit as yet, and so invisible to us, that the pedestrians were heading for. In this mountain region, with little public transport and few cars on the road, people would travel in the way they always had, the way they were used to, on foot.
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