5 Days in Tirana

Tirana's whole story is written on one square, and most of it was laid on top of something else. The Ottoman bazaar once ran up to here. In the 1920s and 30s Italian planners (Armando Brasini, then Florestano Di Fausto, and Gherardo Bosio in 1939) drew the ministries and the boulevard that still frame it. After the war a statue of Stalin stood where the horseman is now. The bronze Skanderbeg Monument, 11 meters tall and by Odhise Paskali, was unveiled in January 1968, 500 years after the national hero's death. Enver Hoxha's own statue, which stood between the museum and the National Bank, came down in 1991 during student-led protests.

The square you see now reopened in June 2017 after a redesign by 51N4E and the artist Anri Sala, and it won the European Prize for Urban Public Space in 2018. It's mostly pedestrian, with the opera, the Palace of Culture, the Bank of Albania and the city hall around it. The National History Museum, on the north-west side, opened in 1981 and is the biggest museum in the country. It has been closed since March 2024, and the museum announced the closure would last until March 2028. You can still look at the huge mosaic over the entrance, The Albanians, finished in 1980. Look at the mosaic and the buildings as well as the horseman.

On the east side of the square, the Et'hem Bey Mosque was started in the 1790s by Molla Bey and finished around 1820 by his son Haxhi Et'hem Bey. It's small, and the reason to go is the paint: trees, waterfalls and bridges cover the portico and the inside, imaginary landscapes rather than real ones. Under communism the mosque was closed. On 18 January 1991, about 10,000 people walked in carrying flags, and the police didn't stop them. That's remembered as a turning point for religious freedom in Albania. A full restoration reopened it in 2021.

Take your shoes off at the door of the inner room and don't go during prayer. Next door the Clock Tower, finished in 1822, was the tallest building in town. The original clock was looted by Austrian forces in World War I, and in 1928 the government bought a new German one for 13,390 gold francs. Climbing its 90 spiral steps costs about 10 lek in cash. Listed hours are short and irregular (Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, in two slots around midday and late afternoon), so treat the top as a bonus.

Six minutes north-east is Pazari i Ri, the New Bazaar. It was built in 1931 on the site of the old bazaar, and in 2017 it was rebuilt so completely that it lost most of what was left of its Ottoman look. It's a pleasant place to eat, not a place to see old Tirana. The small Kokonozi Mosque, finished in 1750, is the one real survivor. It survived communism as a warehouse and a tobacco shop and went back to worship in 1991.

Come for lunch. The streets around the market are full of restaurants and cafés, and this is the easiest place to try byrek (filo pastry pie), qofte (grilled meat patties) or fërgesë (baked peppers and curd cheese) without ordering blind. Look for the places with a short menu and Albanian families at the tables, and ask what the daily dish is.

Walk five minutes south to what's left of the old fortress, a Byzantine-era castle that dates to before 1300 and stood where the main east-west and north-south roads crossed. That crossing was the heart of Tirana. Above ground there's a 6-meter Ottoman-era wall covered in vines, and some uncovered foundations sit in the pedestrian Murat Toptani Street. Since December 2018 a small bazaar of handicraft shops and traditional restaurants has operated inside.

It's a ten-minute stop, not a castle visit. Then walk 300 meters east to the Tanners' Bridge, an 18th-century stone footbridge that once carried the road to the eastern highlands, next to the butchers and leatherworkers. It was restored in the 1990s and is pedestrian only. Look at the river stones laid without any pattern, then keep walking.

The Namazgah Mosque, also called the Great Mosque of Tirana, has room for 10,000 people and is the largest mosque in the Balkans outside East Thrace. Its story fits the city. By 2010 Tirana had only eight mosques, down from 28 in 1967, and the city decided it needed a central one. Construction began in 2015 on a budget of about 30 million euros, partly paid by Turkey's religious affairs authority, and it was officially opened in October 2024.

It sits right by the parliament, so it's an easy stop between the castle and the evening. Look at it from the outside, and go in only if the doors are open to visitors and it isn't prayer time.

Albanians call the evening walk the xhiro, the same idea as the Italian passeggiata. In Tirana it runs along Murat Toptani Street, the boulevard and the edges of Skanderbeg Square, and in Blloku. People walk with no destination, greet friends, stop for a coffee and walk back. It peaks in the warm months, and in November it moves indoors sooner, but the square is lit and still busy after dark.

Do one slow loop from the square along Murat Toptani Street, then end in a café. For something a bit unusual, try a salep, a hot winter drink, at the bookshop café Nektar a few minutes west of the square.

Oda is the original traditional restaurant in a Tirana house, with low tables and ottoman stools, near Pazari i Ri. Beware of the near-namesake: Oda Garden, south of the bazaar, is a different place. The menu centers on tavë kosi, lamb baked under a yogurt custard, and has fërgesë, qofte and byrek too.

Tavë kosi is thought to come from Elbasan and is counted among the national dishes. Order it, plus a few salads to share, and ask for the house raki.

Start with the context. From 1967 to 1991 Albania was officially atheist, and churches and mosques were closed or taken over. The Orthodox cathedral west of the square is part of the answer to that. It opened on 24 June 2012 for the 20th anniversary of the revival of the Albanian Orthodox Church, and it's among the largest Orthodox churches in the Balkans.

The dome is 32 meters high and the bell tower, designed by Archbishop Anastasios, reaches 46 meters, built as four Paschal candles. Go in for the iconography if it's open, and then walk the two minutes to the next stop.

The building started in the 1930s as Albania's first maternity hospital. Within a few years it became something else: the surveillance and interrogation center of the secret police, the Sigurimi, and it stayed one until communism fell. Its official name today is the Museum of Secret Surveillance, and it's a museum about how a state listened to its own people.

Go early and go slowly. It's the most direct of the communist-era museums, because you stand in the building where it happened. Bring cash for the ticket, since card payments may not be accepted.

A five-minute walk away, opposite the city hall, a tunnel and bunker system under the Ministry of the Interior opened as a museum on 19 November 2016. Bunk'Art 2 tells the story of the police and the secret service in Albania from 1912 to 1991, which means the Sigurimi. It runs through about 24 rooms and a little over 1,000 square meters.

The bunker itself isn't the draw. The exhibition on the dictatorship's internal security forces is, and it's well made. If you only have energy for one of the two bunkers, choose this one for the story and the other for the scale. Allow a quiet lunch afterwards.

Walk south down the boulevard to the Pyramid. It opened on 14 October 1988 as the Enver Hoxha Museum, three years after his death, designed in part by his daughter Pranvera Hoxha and her husband Klement Kolaneci, with Pirro Vaso and Vladimir Bregu. It was said to be the most expensive building ever put up in Albania. After 1991 it became a conference center, in 1999 a NATO base, and for years it stood derelict and threatened with demolition.

The demolition was dropped in 2017, and the Dutch firm MVRDV rebuilt it as TUMO, a youth technology center. The stepped façade has been open to the public since May 2023. Climb the steps to the top: the view of the boulevard, Skanderbeg Square and the mountain behind is the best free one in the city.

Five minutes west of the Pyramid is Blloku, now the quarter of Tirana's trendiest cafés and restaurants, some of them in concrete communist apartment blocks. The places here are aimed at a younger, more international crowd than the New Bazaar's, so use it as a coffee-and-sit stop rather than your best Albanian meal.

If you're hungry, a byrek from a bakery is cheaper and just as filling. The people-watching is the point.

During communism Blloku was a closed residential block for party leaders and wasn't marked on most maps, and ordinary Albanians weren't allowed in. It opened to the public in 1991. Enver Hoxha's own residence still stands among the villas. It has been turned into an artists' residency and cultural space, and there's no confirmed public visiting schedule, so treat it as a look from the street unless an event or guided visit is announced.

A few minutes away the Postbllok memorial (opened in 2013 by the writer and former political prisoner Fatos Lubonja and the painter Ardian Isufi) puts three things side by side: a small concrete bunker, the timber supports of a mine gallery from the Spaç labour camp, and a 2.6-ton piece of the Berlin Wall from Potsdamer Platz, donated by the city of Berlin. It takes five minutes and says more than a plaque.

End the day somewhere that jokes about all of it. Komiteti is a café-museum crammed with communist-era objects, near the Pyramid, and the draw is the raki list: guides count anywhere from 18 to nearly 40 kinds. Ask the staff to recommend two or three.

Eat first. It's a place for drinks and talk.

The Dajti Ekspres is a cable car built by Doppelmayr, billed as the longest in the Balkans, that takes about 15 minutes to rise from the edge of the city to the top of Mount Dajti. The mountain is just east of Tirana, and its highest peak, Maja e Dajtit, reaches 1,613 meters. You leave the traffic behind and come out above oak and beech forest.

Get there by the blue Porcelan bus from the Clock Tower (Sahati) near the square: about 20-30 minutes, 40 lek, and a short uphill walk at the end. A taxi from the center is 700-1,000 lek on the meter, or the operator's partner company has a fixed 750 lek. Tickets are only valid on the day you buy them, and the operator doesn't publish its prices online. Reports of the fare vary widely, so ask at the ticket office.

The top station sits in Dajti Mountain National Park, with the Dajti Tower Belvedere Hotel, a restaurant, a mini-golf course and an adventure park. The most useful thing to do is walk to the viewpoints and look back at Tirana in its basin, with the Adriatic out to the north-west on a clear day.

There are walking paths, and a trail runs between the city and the top that takes roughly 2-3 hours one way. It's better to take the cable car and keep your legs for the afternoon. In November the mountain can be cloudy when the city isn't, and the cloud turns the view to white. Ride up anyway for the forest and the quiet.

Ballkoni Dajtit, the cliff-top restaurant at the top station, is open from 11:00 to 17:00 on weekdays (and closed on Tuesday). Locals have long come up to the mountain for a spit-roast lamb lunch, so that's the thing to order if it's on, or tavë dheu, the clay-pot casserole.

The restaurant is paid separately, and there's no meal combo with the cable car ticket.

A few minutes' walk from the cable car's lower station is Bunk'Art 1, a nuclear bunker built between 1972 and 1978 as a refuge for Hoxha and the top of the government. It had 106 rooms and an assembly hall, and it stayed secret for most of its life. Today around 24 of the rooms hold a museum that mixes the modern history of Albania with contemporary art.

This is the one for scale, almost 3,000 square meters underground on several floors. Bunk'Art 2 is the one for the story, so if you did that yesterday, pace yourself here and keep the day's last hour for something outdoors.

Back in the city, the Grand Park is where Tirana goes to walk. It covers 289 hectares at the south end of the boulevard, laid out in 1955-56 on a Bulgarian plan, with a 55-hectare lake in the middle. There's St. Procopius Church, the presidential palace, memorials, and at the southern end a zoo and the botanical garden.

Walk the loop around the lake while there's light. The sun sets around 4:15-4:30 at this time of year and Bunk'Art 1 shuts at 16:30, so leave the bunker by 15:00-15:30 and go straight by bus or taxi, or you'll see the lake only at dusk. An early-morning run or a walk is a daily routine for many residents, which is why it's worth seeing.

Mullixhiu, at the entrance of the Grand Park, is chef Bledar Kola's farm-to-table restaurant. He came back from the Noma kitchen in Copenhagen to reimagine Albanian cooking, so this is traditional dishes reworked with care rather than a plain plate of qofte.

It's the place to spend more on one good meal. If you'd rather keep it cheap, there are cafés on the lake path and plenty of grill places back towards Blloku.

Krujë is where Skanderbeg made his stand. He took the town on 28 November 1443 by tricking its Ottoman governor with a forged letter, and raised the first Albanian flag the same day. The Ottomans besieged it in 1450, 1466 and 1467 and failed each time. It fell only in the late 1470s, after he died in 1468. The museum inside the castle opened on 1 November 1982 and is designed like a medieval stone tower, closer to a memorial than to a museum.

It's worth the ticket for the story of the sieges. The building and its murals are themselves late-communist patriotic work, which is part of what you're looking at. Read the history, then step outside to see why this rock was a good place to defend.

The citadel's walls climb the rock above the town, and inside them are the Teqe of Dollma, a lodge of the Bektashi order of Sufi Muslims, the remains of the Fatih Sultan Mehmed mosque and its minaret, and an old bathhouse. They show that the town changed hands more than once, and that its heroes and its later rulers left buildings next to each other.

Walk the walls for the view over the plain to the sea. The lodge is the quiet corner, so go in if it's open and ask before taking photos. The Bektashi are a Sufi order that is closely tied to Albania, so this is the place to hear about them.

The ethnographic museum is in a restored Ottoman-era house inside the citadel, a minute's walk from the Skanderbeg Museum. It shows how Albanians lived before the 20th century, in a house built for it rather than behind glass.

If you have little time, skip it. If you have an hour to spare, it's a quieter stop than the main museum. It's a separate ticket from the Skanderbeg Museum, and it's listed as open 9:00-16:00.

The lane up to the castle has plenty of places that serve lunch, mostly grilled meat. Order qofte, charcoal-grilled patties with bread and salad, or a tavë dheu if you want the long-cooked pot.

Choose a place with locals at the tables rather than one with a menu board in six languages. Sit on a terrace if the weather allows, and keep some cash for the bazaar afterwards.

The restored bazaar is the lane that leads up to the castle, lined with small shops selling souvenirs and crafts. It's aimed at visitors, and that's fine, because it's the place to buy a gift if you want one. Ask the price before you pick anything up, and compare two or three shops.

Walk the whole lane both ways, because the view changes. When you've had enough, find the bus stop in good time. The bus back to Tirana is the part of the day that's easiest to get wrong, so check the last departure when you arrive.

Durrës was founded in the 7th century BC as Epidamnos by Greek colonists from Corinth and Corcyra, and later became Dyrrachium, where the Via Egnatia started, the Roman road that led east to Constantinople. The amphitheatre went up in the early 2nd century AD, under Trajan, and once seated 20,000 people. It's the largest Roman amphitheatre in the Balkans.

It lay covered and built over until it was found again in late 1966. An early Christian chapel was added in the 4th century and decorated with mosaics in the 6th, and you can still see them, along with a medieval chapel from the 13th. Houses still press against the arena, and the site was shortlisted as one of Europe's most endangered heritage sites in 2013. Walk the galleries and stairs, which is the best part.

Finds from ancient Dyrrachium are kept at the Archaeological Museum, about 400 meters from the amphitheatre on Rruga Taulantia. The city was important enough that the emperor Anastasius I, born here around 430, rebuilt and strengthened its walls after an earthquake.

Before you walk over, ask at the amphitheatre whether the museum is open. National tourism listings say it's open from 9:00 to 15:00 except Monday, but others say it was closed for reconstruction after the 2019 earthquake, with reopening hoped for sometime in 2026. If it's shut, spend the time on the walls.

The old city wall, also called Durrës Castle, is the most visible piece of the Byzantine town. It was rebuilt after the great earthquake of the 4th century, when Anastasius I made the defenses the strongest in the western Balkans, with walls 12 meters high. Venice took the city after the Fourth Crusade in 1205, and the Venetian Tower is a reminder of those years under the republic.

Walk a stretch of the wall and the tower. It's a short stop between the amphitheatre and the harbor.

Durrës is a port, so lunch means fish. Look for restaurants near the harbor and along the seafront boulevard that grill the day's catch whole, with a salad and bread. Ask the price per kilo before you order.

In November the seasonal places on the beach side may be shut, so stay near the harbor and the town center.

Durrës has the country's most popular sandy beach, and in summer it's busy. November is a different place: quiet sand, grey water and a promenade with room to walk. It's the Adriatic without the crowds.

Walk the front for as long as the weather lets you, and look in at the Great Mosque, built in 1931 on the site of an earlier Ottoman mosque, close to the amphitheatre. Then take the bus back to Tirana while there's still light (the last listed departures are around 19:30), and eat dinner there.