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On a cold March day in 1995, fortune blessed me. I had written to the ancient historian N G L Hammond to see if he might meet me. He was 87, so it was a long shot. Not only did I meet him (and his wife), but I was kindly treated to lunch.
After graduating from Cambridge in 1929, Nick Hammond left for Greece on the first of several extended, long-distance, cross-country walking expeditions for which he soon became famous. Something had acted to direct his interests towards Greece’s mountainous north-western region of the country, Epirus, well away from the familiar seeding-grounds of Classical civilisation. For weeks on end, he traversed this rugged country, repeatedly crossing the modern frontier of Albania (fixed only in 1923). He was to repeat this exercise annually, and by 1933 he had devoted a total of seven months to it. As a topographical historian, he believed that personal autopsy not only was the key to understanding military and other history, but could also lead to the discovery of important and unknown monuments. He adopted, along with the necessary recording of what he saw by means of notes, sketches, and photographs, the admirable practice of timing himself over each stretch of his walks – not that his timings by all accounts could be applied by ordinary mortals. Above all, he had an excellent eye for the lie of the land, something that he put into military practice behind enemy lines during the Second World War. Here, in the Plain of Thessaly, he was to disguise himself as a Vlach shepherd, as he led Greek bands against enemy targets. For his valour, he was awarded the DSO and the Greek Grand Cross of the Order of the Phoenix.
Professor Hammond wanted to hear what I made of Albania as much as I wanted to hear of how he first visited the country in 1930. A man of patrician bearing, in my memory his eyes sparkled with wry bemusement as he recalled bathing naked in the Pavllas river, only to be arrested by a baffled Albanian policeman as a spy. This was a biblical age of leaf huts, tents of woven willow, men on mules, and veiled women knitting as they walked. His voice had a sharper edge when he described the rural poverty and then Luigi Maria Ugolini, the Director of the Italian Archaeological Mission at Butrint. Ugolini, Hammond said with gruff assurance, insisted that his Vlach workmen give him a fascist salute before starting the excavations each day. I feasted on Hammond’s words, but failed to ask as many questions as I now realise I should have.
Hammond was a prodigious author of tomes that are the cornerstone of the history of Alexander the Great, Epirus, Macedonia, and the Vlachs. He was also a SOE (Special Operations Executive) Colonel who parachuted into Greece during the Second World War, and on landing a shepherd apparently asked him if he was an angel descended from heaven. Of his many adventures, one stands out. In mid-September 1972, 42 years after meeting Ugolini, Hammond made a seismic impact on Albania when, out of the blue, he was invited to the first Illyrian Congress at Tirana. At that time, Communist Albania had had no contact with Great Britain since 1945. To invite this ex-officer and titan in the field of antiquity was an extraordinary gesture. Having struggled with Communist leaders in wartime Greece, Hammond knew that he had to set aside all his political opinions. Many of those present have told me of the huge impact he made on his audience, speaking in fluent French and German, as well as Greek. Then his hosts offered him a privileged choice: he could visit ancient Graeco-Roman sites in either North or South Albania, or he could visit prehistoric sites in and around the Korça Basin of south-east Albania. He chose the latter.
Accompanied by the brilliant prehistorian Frano Prendi and a junior architectural historian of fortresses from Korça, Gjerak Karaiskaj, Hammond’s objective was a southern appendage of the Korça Basin, the plain of Poloskë. Encircled on three sides by towering mountains, a pass on its south side provided access to Thessaly and points south-eastwards in Greece. This little basin also boasts a remarkable natural feature: the Wolf’s Pass. Discreetly located like a postern gate on its east flank, this 30m-wide natural canyon leads to Little Lake Prespa. Hereabouts, Hammond believed, was the battleground where Alexander the Great won one of his earliest victories… and two years later, in The Journal of Hellenic Studies (1974), aided by sketch maps Hammond probably made in Albania, he claimed to have found it.
In search of Pelion
In 335 BC, according to Alexander the Great’s Roman- period biographer Arrian, the Macedonian king led his army westwards. Hammond believed that Arrian’s source for his account was an eye-witness, such is the topographic colour in an account made almost half a millennium later. Alexander swept north to the Danube and then got word that the Illyrians, learning of Alexander’s absence from his homeland, determined to ravage Macedonia. The Illyrian warlord Cleitus embarked on his march towards Macedonia by descending down to Lake Ohrid and then southwards, passing through the Korça plain to the Poloskë basin, before heading for Pelion, the strongest ‘city’ at the western terminus of the Wolf’s Pass. In Arrian’s concertinaed account, Alexander with characteristic speed raced southwards to confront the Illyrians.
With the Illyrians ensconced in Pelion, Alexander lined up his armies on the flat ground around the citadel of Pelion. According to Arrian, the Illyrians sacrificed three boys, three girls, and three black rams before rushing down to engage the Macedonians at close quarters. The Illyrians were repulsed, but Alexander was forced to withdraw when another Illyrian army appeared in force. Realising he was outnumbered, Alexander retreated with his force of 25,000 men and 5,000 horses. The withdrawal proved to be a feint. Hammond admired Alexander’s daring as much as his discipline. He posits a brilliant Macedonian stratagem of a second attack three days later. This involved returning through the Wolf’s Pass and surprising the enemy. His speed and the use of a combination of drilled cavalry and siege catapults caught the enemy off-guard. News then came of a revolt in Thebes, prompting Alexander to depart hastily. The Illyrian commander Cleitus had learnt his lesson. He razed Pelion and hared off northwards, abandoning his over-ambitious plan to outflank Alexander.
Hammond was not the first to admire overtly Alexander’s skilful drilling of his troops at Pelion. The Napoleonic-period antiquarian spies William Martin Leake and François Pouqueville – on opposing sides of the conflict – each searched for the battleground in 1805. A succession of other scholars joined in the search over the following decades. Soon the site of the battlefield was linked to the ‘lost’ castle of Diabolis. Both lost places occupied a strategic point on a trans-Balkan route, marking an age when the route from the Adriatic Sea to Thessalonica was one of the great highways of the globe. Diabolis was a major Byzantine stronghold where, according to the Princess Anna Comnena, her father, the Emperor Alexius I, rested after being defeated at Dyrrachium in 1096 by the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard’s buccaneering son Bohemond. Here, too, in 1105, Alexius I and Bohemond signed an accord.
With help from his Albanian colleagues, Hammond visited all the fortresses either side of that narrow defile, the Wolf’s Pass. The young Karaiskaj, Albania’s authority on military fortifications, provided sufficient detail of each hilltop encampment. Then, with the help of Second World War military maps, Hammond sketched out the battlefield positions in relation to these strongholds. This bold exercise in imaginative military history has won supporters and as many detractors. The matter can only be resolved, as the ancient historian Tom Winnifrith put it, by archaeological excavations. Detractors point to candidates for Pelion closer to Korça, and one even proposed an Illyrian settlement of monumental tombs far to the north, overlooking the western limits of Lake Ohrid. Nonetheless, reading Hammond’s account – as in his great tomes on Epirus and the Macedonians – you feel that you are in the company of someone who understood landscape as the ancients did, and had the judgement of an ancient too.
Tom Winnifrith’s words calling for excavations to decide the debate prompted my first visit to this corner of Albania. In 2005, I visited Lorenc Bejko who was directing an intensive survey of the fields in exactly this area on the eastern edges of the Poloskë plain. His interest was principally in the prehistoric archaeology and how this related to the better-known sites discovered in the Korça Basin. Lorenc’s survey picked up potsherds and tile from all periods. In 2005, of all the sites found, my imagination was captured by a cone-like hill now called ‘Trajan’, which towers above the Wolf’s Pass. After climbing it, as I told Lorenc, I was convinced this was Diabolis. For a long time, I thought to return, but other projects always intervened. Nonetheless, as time went on, the view from Trajan and its setting, associated with Alexander the Great’s disciplining of the Illyrians, stayed in my mind. Was the battle at Pelion at the foot of this cone-shaped hill? Was Trajan, with its evocative name, really Diabolis? Why not do what Tom Winnifrith proposed, and mount a small excavation to shift the pendulum of probability in Hammond’s direction? So, to write informed grant applications to raise funds for just such a project, I ventured back to Wolf’s Pass and the constellation of sites at either end of this secret defile.
Conquering Trajan
Four of us made the journey on the last weekend in September, armed with publications including a recent one by a Serbian scholar who supports Hammond’s location of Pelion. Cloudless skies and mountain ranges filled our far vision. The blissful landscape made me fear the worst: so much has changed in the last decade in Albania. My intuition was partly right. We followed the placid Devoll river into the Poloskë plain and almost at once encountered a solar-panel farm covering a hill close to Trajan. Once past it, though, nothing had changed. It was just as Hammond must have seen it: a world of shepherds and their flocks. For this, we must be grateful to the recent creation of the Prespa National Park. As tourism to coastal Albania has become supersonic, this place remains blissfully off the beaten path.
Trajan is the biggest of the fortresses here, its walled area covering 24ha. Situated on the immediate south side of the Wolf’s Pass, it overshadows a lower, isolated hill called Ventrok. Within the defile itself is located the cave of Tren, excavated in the 1960s. Beyond, on the cliffs far above the entrance to the pass, are ochrous paintings of huntsmen with lances chasing deer. Then, commanding the north side of Little Lake Prespa is a flat promontory called Gradishta e Shuecit, which is fortified by a massive agger. On the flat ground in front of this well-placed fort are Iron Age tumuli, which were excavated in the 1960s. Archaeological sites dominate this little corner of Albania but, of course, it is the lake poking its western end into the Wolf’s Pass that makes this place so very special.
My sights were set on returning first to Trajan, a pinnacle with a readily visible defensive wall running around its girth. So we drove into the red-roofed village of Tren, nestling in the coombe below the cone. The village houses at Tren have all seen better times, but their gardens are magnificent verdant oases thanks to plentiful water. We paused at a bar to quiz two locals on the best way up to the summit. They pointed to a damaged cobbled road, telling us to park by the spring. Water gushed into a well-worn marble basin that had been removed from some nearby ancient or medieval site. Next to it, two old ladies in black were cheerily passing the time of day, and they were eager to explain how best to conquer Trajan. They estimated 20 to 30 minutes. This, it soon proved, was optimistic or, at best, country time. A steep initial climb out of Tren took us to a narrow track following the contours of the hill that connects Tren to Albania’s last village at Buzliqen. From here, Trajan stands proud.
A long wall up to 1.75m wide departs from the track and runs along the often-precipitous ridge all the way to the summit. The coursed wall has a cut-stone face and is mortared. It reminds me of the Byzantine defences I have seen on Naxos and in Sicily. It is an ambitious statement, surely intended to be seen from the east as a high curtain beyond which, across the upper slope of Trajan, lay ranks of dwellings. In 2005, Lorenc’s field-survey teams picked up sherds of Hellenistic, Roman, Late Roman, and medieval date. The ground was probably clearer then, thanks to grazing goats; I found only Mid Byzantine handles from coarse jugs. This said, most Byzantine castles are cuckoos occupying places that had long-established histories. Trajan would seem likely to boast of a deep past.
Climbing through the undergrowth, the strategic value of Trajan soon becomes evident. To the east, far below, lies Little Lake Prespa, set deep into the bare hills of northern Greece and, beyond, North Macedonia. Little Prespa covers 46.9km2, divided between Albania and Greece. Apart from two Albanian villages immediately below Trajan’s east-facing flank, not a single dwelling can be seen. It is a tantalisingly evocative ecological wilderness. The lake waters fade into thick reed marshes about 5km east of Trajan, which narrow towards the Wolf’s Pass. Mysteriously, the sickle-shaped lake is steadily becoming lower. One recent study shows that it has dropped about 8m over the past 40 years as a result of less precipitation in the area. Winter snow is becoming a memory as a result of warmer weather. Little Prespa’s recent history was also complicated by the diversion of water from the river Devoll into the lake in the 1950s and afterwards, as the much smaller Lake Maliq in the neighbouring Korça plain was drained. What is evident is that, as recently as Ottoman times, Little Prespa poked through the Wolf’s Pass directly below Trajan and terminated close to its narrow west end.
It took a good 45 minutes to climb to the summit of Trajan, tiptoeing over piled scree and pursuing goat paths wherever possible. At 1,189m, it commands seemingly limitless vistas in all directions: to the far end of Little Prespa, to the Tsangon Pass leading into the Korça, and on this clear afternoon far to the west where the shadowy outlines of the Gramos mountains mark the horizon like shards of misty green glass. Around the summit runs an enclosure wall: a rough semi-circle about 25m in radius. In the centre, at the highest point, is situated a mound about 5m square. This is almost certainly a small stone keep. Here the east-facing side falls away vertically. Was this Diabolis? Did the Emperor Alexius I reside here in AD 1105? Were Norman envoys entertained at this giddy spot? Only excavations might resolve whether indeed it is a castle. As for being Diabolis, only the improbable discovery of an inscription might settle the issue. One thing is certain, spectacularly located though it might be, for all its later fame, its architectural footprint was minuscule.
Beyond the Wolf’s Pass
Far below, it seems, lies the Wolf’s Pass. The defile cannot be more than 200m long, but the darkened passage seems longer. Today, a single-track road runs along a shelf on its south side, before twisting down to Tren cave and crossing a narrow bridge over the reeds that now fill the defile. Excavations of the cave and its foreground produced important Neolithic, Iron Age, Roman, and medieval remains. Evidently, this was home to guards overseeing the pass for many millennia. In Alexander the Great’s time, Little Prespa would have been possibly 8m to 10m higher, so if his army really came this way, they did it in a tight file along the shelf immediately above the cave that the present road follows.
Other armies surely passed this way, heading along the north shore of the lake. That may explain the paintings of horsemen with lances hunting deer on the sheer rock-face above the west end of the lake. Some Albanian archaeologists believed these were prehistoric works of art, but as Hammond notes they are medieval, and he proposes parallels in the Balkans. Visiting the paintings today means taking your life in your hands. They are located about a hundred metres above the road, accessible by a near-vertical channel in the cliff-face.
Below the paintings, the lake widens out and reaches at least 2km across to the Albanian border village of Buzliqen. A carpet of reeds with the odd patch of open water runs as far as the eye can see. It is alive with marsh birds. The lakeland is serene and silent. A kilometre ahead, the road twists to the north around a promontory. There is no sign, but the promontory is inviting for a reason: this was Gradishta e Shuecit. It is easy to weave through the waist-high vegetation to a massive agger, as Hammond describes it: a rampart that runs across the humped 150m breadth of the promontory. Today, the agger stands about 10m high and is made principally of loose stone. In the Iron Age, it is likely to have stood higher. Such is the depth of stone that, in Communist times, a military trench was sunk into its eastern end, so that Albanian soldiers might spy on the Greek and Macedonian borders and on citizens intent on escaping the country. Inside the promontory are signs of likely dwellings, as well as potsherds. From here, there is a panoramic view of the Wolf’s Pass, Trajan, and the entire western end of Little Lake Prespa.
Was this promontory fortress in use when Alexander the Great passed this way? Zhaneta Andrea’s excavations of two Iron Age tumuli just outside the imposing agger suggest not. Yet, being such a strategic point in terms of fishing, with high pastures in every direction, it was surely not abandoned when half a millennium later the Macedonians passed this way? Hammond must have wondered this too. Standing on this tongue of land, you look directly down the Wolf’s Pass. Immediately beyond it, at its far west end, 2km away, is Ventroq. Fortifications enclose its crown. Being a sentinel immediately above the defile, it was in Hammond’s view the obvious location of the fateful Pelion. Today, on returning through the Wolf’s Pass to inspect it, it appears a little hapless. Its flanks are corrugated with deeply cut Communist-period terraces. Had the solitary hill been so disfigured in 1972 when Hammond was here? Below it, where today we found a shepherd and his flock, Hammond posited Alexander’s camp.
My sense, after seeing these sites, is that a ground survey of each fortress accompanied by small excavations is called for. Lorenc’s survey provides an invaluable first step in such research. My sense, too, is that Arrian, writing half a millennium after the death of his Macedonian hero, possibly inflates the story. Were there really thousands in the Macedonian army? Was Pelion a single place or a constellation of fortified hilltops and households who responded to the call of duty as best they could, but ended up on the wrong side of history after Alexander became great as a result of his fabled Asian adventures?
Rozafa Fish City
Trajan and Little Lake Prespa are arcadian vistas in a country that has suffered and now, released, is prospering. My friends wanted to treat me to a lunch that conjured up the new Albania. We followed the placid Devoll river through the Tsangon Pass, and then crossed the Korça plain to Maliq. Although Hammond does not mention it, his guide, the prehistorian Frano Prendi, must have made this the first point on the itinerary to this area in September 1972. Here, during the 1950s, the little lake was drained by the political prisoners from a nearby camp. The draining produced spectacular remains of Neolithic timber lake-dwellings, pottery, and clay figurines of the 5th millennium BC. The reclamation was made to grow sugar beet. In the village of Maliq itself, a brick-built barn of a factory was erected to process the beet.
In 2005, when I passed this way, the factory was a ruin, a silent memorial to the slave-prisoners who had lost their lives to feed the country’s sweet tooth. Today, it is Rozafa Fish City, one of a chain of seafood restaurants. The restored factory is an extraordinary post-modern eatery that provokes contemplation by its Albanian clients about the Communist past and the aspirational present. It also pays due respect to the prisoners and their achievements. No less important, within the huge, sensitively restored beet factory, fish from the Adriatic Sea rather than the local lakes is the bill of fare. Inside, within décor celebrating and teasing a galaxy of world leaders as well as stars, the past and present are fused into one. The experience is mind-bending. What might Hammond have made of this? When I had lunch with him in 1995, he described the grinding poverty at Butrint 65 years earlier. Such rural poverty would have been less evident in 1972, when he passed Maliq in search of Alexander the Great’s battlefield at Pelion. Today, in this bizarre but eloquent building, Hammond would surely have smiled, wondering perhaps, as that wartime Greek shepherd did when Hammond dropped in by parachute, whether he had become an angel.
My thanks to Lorenc Bejko and my companions on this adventure, Saimir Dhamo, Nevila Molla, and Iris Pojani, for making the search for Pelion every bit as memorable as N G L Hammond’s trip 50 years ago.
Richard Hodges is President Emeritus of the American University of Rome.
All images: courtesy of Richard Hodges
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