There is a specific quality of light that arrives in Berat at around five in the afternoon between April and September. It comes from the west, from the direction of the Osumi canyon, and it hits the white Ottoman houses stacked on the hillside of Mangalem at an angle that makes them glow — not metaphorically but literally, a warm amber luminescence that photographers wait for and that locals have stopped noticing the way you stop noticing a beautiful thing you live inside.
Berat is called the city of a thousand windows because of the stacked houses of Mangalem and the parallel quarter of Gorica across the river — both hillsides covered in white-painted stone buildings whose large windows, characteristic of the Ottoman period, stare down at the valley below like eyes that have been watching for several centuries and have seen enough to have stopped being surprised.
The castle
The castle at the top of the Mangalem hill is not a ruin in the conventional sense. People live inside it. Families have lived inside its walls for centuries, through Byzantine and Ottoman and communist periods, through earthquake and siege and the particular Albanian version of the twentieth century. There are churches converted to mosques and then back to churches. There is a museum of medieval icons that contains some of the most extraordinary Byzantine painting in the Balkans, displayed in a building with a leaking roof and hand-written labels and opening hours that are approximate.
Walking through the castle at the end of the day, when the tour groups have left and the families who live there are sitting outside their doors, you pass through something that resists simple description — not a museum, not a village, not a ruin, but all three simultaneously, still being lived in, still adjusting.
“The icon museum has some of the finest Byzantine painting in the Balkans. Its opening hours are approximate.”
The Mangalem quarter
Below the castle, the Mangalem quarter descends in a sequence of cobbled lanes so steep in places that the cobbles are carved with grooves to prevent slipping. The houses date mostly from the eighteenth century, three-storey structures built around internal courtyards with wooden balconies overhanging the street — the upper floors projecting further out than the lower, a technique that gives more interior space while keeping the ground-floor street shaded.
Some houses have been converted to guesthouses. The better ones let you stay in rooms that have wooden ceilings decorated with geometric patterns painted three hundred years ago, slightly faded now, still precise. The beds are modern. The views from the upper-floor windows are exactly what the original builders intended.
The wine
The Berat region produces wine that most of the world doesn't know exists. The Shesh i Zi grape — a red variety found almost nowhere outside Albania — makes a wine that is dark and tannic and slightly rustic in a way that works with the lamb dishes the area does well. The Shesh i Bardh, its white equivalent, is lighter, mineral, the kind of wine that tastes specifically of its place.
There are several small wineries in the hills south of town that will open bottles for strangers if you arrive at a reasonable hour and seem genuinely interested. The wine is underpriced. This will not last.
The forty minutes
At five o'clock I walked to the bridge across the Osumi that gives the best view of Mangalem. A man was fishing from the bank below. A dog slept in the middle of the lane leading up to the castle. The light arrived as scheduled, moving across the white facades in sequence from the top of the hill downward, the castle glowing first, then the houses, then the river itself catching some of it.
The forty minutes during which this happens are the reason Berat has been photographed from this exact spot approximately four hundred thousand times. They are also, somehow, not over-photographed — or the photographs don't quite get it, which is why people keep trying. The light is not a backdrop. It is something the city does, an action, a showing-off that has been happening every clear afternoon for three hundred years and will continue regardless of who is there to see it.
When it was over I walked back into the quarter, found a table outside a restaurant whose name I didn't write down, ordered the Shesh i Zi and whatever they were making with lamb that evening, and stayed until the candles on the tables were the main light source. This, it turned out, was also the right thing to do.
Klodiana Marku studied Byzantine art history in Athens before returning to Albania to guide heritage tours. She has led groups through the Berat castle for nine years.
