Gjirokastër is a city built of stone on a hillside above the Drino Valley in southern Albania. The houses are stone — limestone walls, stone floors, roofs of grey slate. The streets are cobblestone. The castle above them is stone. The effect, seen from across the valley, is a single grey mass climbing the slope, interrupted only by the wooden shutters and balconies of the tower houses.
UNESCO inscribed the city in 2005 as a World Heritage Site — one of the best-preserved Ottoman-era towns in Europe. But the settlement is older than the Ottomans by centuries, and the two people most associated with it — Enver Hoxha and Ismail Kadare — belong to the 20th century. Gjirokastër’s history compresses an unusual range of Albanian experience into one small city.
The name: Argyrokastro
The earliest recorded name for the site is Argyrokastro — from the Greek argyro (silver) and kastro (castle). The name first appears in 1336, in the chronicle of the Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos. The “silver” may refer to the color of the limestone, or to the silver mines once worked in the region, or it may be a folk etymology that attached to a name already in use. Albanian shortened it to Gjirokastër; the Greek form Argyrokastro persists in Greek-language sources.
The settlement predates the name — archaeological evidence suggests habitation before the Byzantine period. The castle hill — the dominant feature of the site — was likely fortified before the Byzantine period. By the 13th century, Gjirokastër was an administrative center within the Despotate of Epirus, and by the 14th century, the Albanian feudal lords of the region — the Zenebishi family — governed it.
The Ottomans took the city in 1417. Under Ottoman rule, Gjirokastër became the administrative seat of a sanjak (district) and later a vilayet. The tower houses that define the city today date mostly from the 17th through 19th centuries — the period when the city’s merchant and landowning families built their fortified residences on the slope below the castle.
The castle
Gjirokastër Castle (Kalaja e Gjirokastrës) sits on the ridgeline above the city, overlooking the Drino Valley. It is one of the largest castles in the Balkans by area — the fortified enclosure stretches roughly 500 meters along the ridge. The walls and towers are a mix of periods: Byzantine foundations, Ottoman-era reconstruction, and 20th-century additions including a clock tower built during the reign of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, who used Gjirokastër as one of his strongholds in the early 1800s.
Inside the walls, the castle holds a military museum, an open-air amphitheater (the stage for the National Folklore Festival), and, since 1970s-era additions by the communist government, a collection of captured Italian and German military equipment from World War II. A US Air Force jet — a Lockheed T-33 — sits on display near the entrance, supposedly forced to land during the Cold War, though the exact circumstances are disputed.
The castle’s most striking feature is its position. The ridge drops steeply on both sides, and the view from the walls takes in the full width of the Drino Valley, the houses stacked below, and the mountains beyond. The castle was never an isolated fortification; it was the top of a city that grew downhill from it.
The tower houses
Gjirokastër’s architecture is defined by the kullë — the fortified tower house. These are not the timber-and-plaster Ottoman houses found in Berat or Ohrid. They are stone structures, three to four stories tall, built by merchant and landowner families between the 17th and 19th centuries. Each house was designed to be self-sufficient and defensible: ground floors for storage and livestock, middle floors for family life, upper floors for guests, and a cistern in the basement for water during a siege.
The design reflects the security conditions of southern Albania during and after the Ottoman period. Feuds between families and clans, banditry in the surrounding countryside, and periodic military conflicts made domestic fortification a practical concern, not an affectation. The thick stone walls, small lower windows, and internal water supply were functional.
Two houses are open to visitors. The Zekate House (Shtëpia e Zekatëve), built in 1811–1812, is three stories tall with twin towers flanking a central arch — one of the most photographed buildings in Albania. The upper floors have carved wooden ceilings, painted walls, and a reception room with an interior fountain. The Skenduli House (Shtëpia e Skëndulit), also from the early 19th century, is similarly preserved and shows the full vertical arrangement: storage, kitchen, family quarters, guest floor.
Together, the tower houses give Gjirokastër a skyline unlike any other Albanian city. Where Berat’s character comes from hundreds of windows — light timber houses facing the sun — Gjirokastër’s comes from stone mass: grey walls, grey roofs, narrow streets between buildings that were designed to keep people out.
The Old Bazaar
Gjirokastër’s Ottoman bazaar sits on the slope below the castle, along cobblestone streets that follow the contour of the hill. The bazaar dates to the 17th century and was a commercial center for the region’s textile and agricultural trade. The shops are stone-built, with wide arched openings at ground level and storage or living quarters above.
The bazaar today is smaller than its historical extent — some sections were lost to fire and neglect over the centuries, and the communist-era redevelopment of the lower city replaced parts of the old market district. What remains is concentrated along a few streets near the castle approach and is partly restored for tourism. Craft shops, cafes, and small hotels occupy the old merchant buildings. The scale is modest: this is not a grand covered market like Istanbul’s, but a hill-town trading street where the architecture is the point.
Two sons of one city
Gjirokastër’s modern identity is inseparable from two men who were born there 28 years apart.
Enver Hoxha was born in Gjirokastër on 16 October 1908, the son of a Muslim cloth merchant. He left for schooling in Korçë and later in France, returned to Albania, and by 1944 had established the communist regime that he led until his death in 1985 — four decades. Under his rule, roughly 5,500 Albanians were executed and tens of thousands sent to forced-labor camps or internal exile. The original family house was destroyed by fire in the mid-1960s; a museum was built on the site in 1966, operating as the Anti-Fascist Museum during communist rule and renamed the Ethnographic Museum after 1991. For the full account of his regime and its consequences, see Enver Hoxha.
Ismail Kadare was born in Gjirokastër on 28 January 1936. He became Albania’s most internationally recognized writer, the author of The General of the Dead Army, Chronicle in Stone, The Palace of Dreams, and dozens of other novels and poetry collections. Chronicle in Stone (1971) is set in Gjirokastër during the Italian and German occupations of World War II and draws directly on his childhood memories of the city — the stone houses, the castle, the war overhead. Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and was repeatedly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on 1 July 2024 in Tirana at the age of 88. For more on his life and work, see Ismail Kadare.
The two men were products of the same city, the same narrow stone streets, the same tower houses. One built a police state; the other wrote novels inside it. The Ethnographic Museum that bears neither of their names sits in the house where Hoxha was born, in a city where Kadare set his most personal work.
The Ethnographic Museum
The Ethnographic Museum (Muzeu Etnografik) stands on the site of Enver Hoxha’s birth house in the old quarter. The original house was destroyed by fire in the mid-1960s. The current building was constructed in 1966 and operated as the Anti-Fascist Museum during the communist period, dedicated to the regime’s narrative. After 1991, it was repurposed as a museum of regional domestic life: traditional costumes, weaving tools, kitchen implements, woodworking, and the daily routines of a tower-house household.
For visitors, the museum’s interest is double. The building itself demonstrates the kulla architecture — the vertical arrangement of living, the stone construction, the defensive design. And the fact of its history — a dictator’s birthplace turned regime museum turned ethnographic collection — compresses Albanian 20th-century history into one address.
The Folklore Festival
The National Folklore Festival (Festivali Folklorik Kombëtar) has been held in Gjirokastër approximately every five years since 1968. The festival takes place in the open-air amphitheater inside the castle walls, with a seating capacity of about 3,000 and the Drino Valley as a backdrop.
The communist government founded the festival as a tool for cultural standardization — folk traditions from across Albania, performed and catalogued under state direction. After 1991, the festival continued without the ideological frame, and it has expanded to include Albanian folk groups from Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and diaspora communities in Europe and the United States.
The festival is the largest event associated with Albanian folk music and dance, and it has helped sustain performance traditions — particularly the southern Albanian iso-polyphony (iso-polifonia), which UNESCO proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005, the same year Gjirokastër received its own inscription. The two designations are connected: the city is one of the places where iso-polyphony has been performed continuously, and the festival is one of the stages where it is most reliably heard.
The Drino Valley
Gjirokastër sits on the western slope of the Drino Valley, roughly 30 kilometers from the Greek border. The Drino River (Lumi i Drinos) runs north to south through the valley and joins the Vjosa near Tepelenë. The valley is agricultural — olives, citrus, and grain — and the surrounding mountains rise steeply on both sides, isolating the corridor and giving it a microclimate milder than the Albanian interior.
The city’s population is roughly 25,000 in the municipal center, smaller than it was before the emigration wave that followed the fall of communism in 1991. Many families from Gjirokastër emigrated to Greece — the border is close, and Greek-language communities existed in the region historically. Others went to Tirana, to Italy, to the United States. The Greek minority community in the Drino Valley and the surrounding Dropull region remains one of Albania’s recognized ethnic minorities.
For the Albanian diaspora in the United States, Gjirokastër is one of the cities that appears in family histories — a place name attached to grandparents or great-grandparents. The tower houses, the castle, the bazaar — these are specific enough to stand as memory, and old enough to still be standing when a descendant goes back to look.