Vlorë County

Saving Saranda

Strictly speaking Saranda cannot be saved. When I first came here in September 1993, a year after Albania became a democracy, it was a blissful Ionian seaport. Many of its citizens had left for Greece, so it felt empty, yet…

Being ‘a Greek spy’ back at Butrint

I was in Greece, rolling off a ferry at Kyllini, about to visit its mighty castle, when I received the text message accusing me of being a Greek spy. Almost at once, I got an avalanche of emails from angry…

Corpus of the Mosaics of Albania Volume 1: Butrint intramuros

Review by Oliver J Gilkes Everybody likes mosaic pavements; they are ancient artefacts that entrance and beguile the visitor at Greek and Roman sites. No matter that floor mosaics (the majority of survivals) were little more than rugs and mats,…

Confronting Climate Change at Butrint

A new report spells out the risks that rising sea levels pose to some of the world’s greatest archaeological sites. Richard Hodges and David Prince consider the situation at Butrint.

ABOVE The theatre at Butrint lay within a sanctuary complex devoted to the cult of Ascelpius. A set of inscriptions documenting the manumission of slaves were found when the theatre was excavated in 1928. Although the inscriptions have since degraded, an important new discovery provides an opportunity to see the texts as they appeared shortly after they were unearthed.

Butrint’s slave manumissions: shedding new light on the UNESCO World Heritage city

During 2020, 'squeezes' – copies – made in the 1930s of Butrint’s exceptional inscriptions from the Sanctuary of Asclepius were rediscovered by chance. Enrico Giorgi shares the story of these texts and their facsimiles.

Albania: the visit of the World Bank President

Let me go back over a quarter-century to Albania on a blissful autumn day in 1995 when, like a Martian, the President of the World Bank descended upon us.

BELOW The compitum, showing the platform with round altar and pedestal of Aulus Granius, honorific bench, and water basin looking north east. The excavation photograph from 1966 (inset) shows the marble semi circular base for the honorific seat as discovered in situ, in front of Granius’ two monuments.

Albania and the Death of Pan

Devil or pastoral sprite and mischief-maker, Pan’s presence in the form of the lost sanctuary on Mount Mile lends a new dimension to the god’s story

The Past

A sense of place

Using the unlikely site of Butrint in Albania as a prime example, Richard Hodges explains how the work of archaeologists defines them as placemakers

Above An aerial view of the Hellenistic theatre at Butrint.

Butrint: finding a timeless oasis

Shortly after the end of the Cold War, exactly a decade before CWA was launched, Richard Hodges walked through the ruins at Butrint. Here, he looks back over 20 years of discovery and excavation at this ancient city that sits on the idyllic shores of the Ionian Sea.

Butrint from the air: an aerial perspective of a Classical and late antique Mediterranean city

Joint excavations between the British Butrint Foundation and the Albanian Institute of Archaeology are revealing the complex history of the ancient Adriatic port of Butrint. With funding from the Packard Humanities Institute, a well-preserved archaeological sequence, and a team of…