Butrint: finding a timeless oasis

Butrint is eternal. It owes a priceless debt to Virgil’s Aeneid: the exiled hero from Troy, Aeneas, pauses here on the way to found Rome. At a stroke, Butrint was on the world map. Virgil’s choice of Butrint – ‘a Troy in miniature’ – was no accident. As a member of Augustus’s new Imperial court at Rome, he was paying personal tribute to the Emperor’s right-hand man, Admiral Agrippa, whose first wife came from Butrint. With such serendipity, this place has been forever sealed in aspic, at least until our era.

For most visitors today, however, Butrint conjures up an entirely different experience. It is the ‘Other’, a paradise, a place in a Homeric landscape, somewhere simply and pleasantly timeless. It was extraordinarily beautiful when Enver Hoxha’s infernal regime collapsed in 1991; quite unforgettable when I first ventured here in 1993; and remains a precious oasis within the mayhem of modern Albania today. Returning to visit the new excavations, the glorious assault on one’s senses is as powerful as ever. You need know nothing about Aeneas to be seduced by the shimmering reflections off the lagoon, or to fall in love with the shafts of sparkling light on the monuments, filtered by the woodland canopy where golden orioles flit through the foliage like tropical parrots. Butrint really fits our new global ideals of a UNESCO World Heritage Site – it was inscribed in 1992.

On a mission

I first came here at the suggestion of the British ambassador in Rome. Lord Rothschild and his friend Lord Sainsbury were seeking an archaeologist to dig the site. Together, the lords had created a foundation after briefly visiting this erstwhile pariah state. As for me, I had always wanted to excavate a Classical port on the Mediterranean: being at the crossroads of the Mare Nostrum, this promised to be the opportunity of a lifetime. Then reality intruded.

The barely dressed children dancing with their mutts around the plane when it landed in Albania’s capital, Tirana, illustrated what lay ahead: a land benighted by 50 years of impoverishment. Ravaged by the parched-earth destruction of olive groves, vineyards, and collective farms by its starving peasants as the tyrants fell, it was like visiting a film set on location at the end of World War II. Every encounter was a shrill lament about the loss of opportunity, and profound fear of the future.

With the mention of Butrint, though, there was a visible counter-reaction – Butrint equalled paradise on earth. The first to make this point to me, as chance had it, was the first Albanian I encountered a mere three hours after arriving: Prime Minister Aleksander Meksi. Finding him was a kind of puzzle. No one stopped us entering the tawdry, Italianate government building, so we marched resolutely on, straightening our ties, till beyond the last door in this labyrinth we discovered one of Albania’s previously well-known archaeologists. He described the calamity of his country; but on reaching the point of the meeting, Butrint, he switched gears, and became unexpectedly lyrical. This was more than an archaeological site that he was offering me: this was paradise. There were almost tears in his tired eyes. It was as though he was negotiating the hand of his daughter – precious beyond words. So often afterwards, I sensed, when the hellishness of working in Albania had become too great, this belief in the virginal property of this spiritually exceptional place came to the fore. ‘How could you fail such a maiden?’ was the unspoken question.

Twenty years have since passed, and daily life has mellowed. Albania has prospered despite its arrantly corrupt governments. Amusingly, Albania’s premier treasure today is where brides parade in their gowns with silken trails like flocks of long-tailed swallows once summer has come. After two decades, the sylvan spirit of Butrint, in contrast to so much of Albania that has been needlessly forfeited to craven development, is as magical as ever. Let me try to explain how this miracle of preservation happened.

A fragile idyll