Saving Saranda

This article is from World Archaeology issue 129

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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 also a discreet paradise from another age. Now, with literally hundreds of hotels, a summer population five times its residents in number, and even a small expatriate community, it has assumed a charmless anonymity that I associate with dozens of similar places around the Mediterranean. But over the arc of the last 30 years, I have tried to make something of its archaeology and history. It is my contribution to saving something of a particular memory of a person that I cherish.

On my first evening in Saranda, I met Kosta Lako. It proved to be a Damascene encounter. Without realising it, he persuaded me that not only was the archaeology at Saranda and neighbouring Butrint well worth studying, but – with his quintessential modesty – that he was someone who, despite Communist obstacles, had excavated and published to a very high standard. Kosta had a prematurely careworn face but sharp dancing eyes. He was my age, I guessed (he was in fact three years older), yet in his body, as in his face, you could see – as you don’t in most men – the face and body of the boy he once was. There was an engaging yet restrained keenness trembling within him. With his Albanian colleagues, we had sauntered at an agonising pace along Saranda’s seafront. As we did this, I was struck by the brilliant scales of the sea reaching to the far silhouette of Corfu. The port was intimate, gentle, and belonged to a lost age before mass tourism. Our first objective was to visit the Late Antique basilica (and earlier synagogue) beside the Rruga Skënderbeu that Kosta had recently excavated, and then, close by, the wretched basement office where he and his two colleagues worked in a soupy light.

Kosta’s studies of Saranda’s archaeology immediately impressed me. Sitting in his office, conscious of the damp and the darkening light, I realised we were being royally treated as he took his doctoral thesis out and laid it graciously on the stained, unsteady table. Entitled Qyteti i Onhezmit në Antikitetin e Vonë (The City of Onhezm in Late Antiquity), it was the product of many small salvage excavations in the port made over the previous two decades. Flicking through it, the text was faintly blurred by a worn typewriter ribbon on wafer-thin paper, I instinctively marvelled at its cogent analysis. Thinking back, how glad I am that I breezily complemented the author. He screwed up his face a little, ageing before my eyes. In his husky English, he thanked me. He did not ask for anything more, then or ever again. Decades have now passed, and Kosta is no longer with us. I realise how fortunate I was to encounter him as I navigated the enigma that was Albania in the first flush of its liberty. In time, I came to appreciate that the end of Communism terminated the safe if unreal stability of his scholar’s life and compelled him to reckon everything in terms of dollars or drachmas to sustain his family. With altered priorities, Kosta knew that his thesis, an exercise made against the odds, was the apogee of his life, and destiny from that time had to be measured in terms of his family. His quiet defeat was my first lesson in Albania’s crushing post-Communist realpolitik – the transition economy years, as they were known. Even so, now two years after he has passed away, I still think of him, and this has led me and my colleagues back to re-examine and honour his work on ancient Saranda – Onchesmos – and the great Late Antique sanctuary above it, Santi Quaranta.

A place with many names

Saranda has changed its name several times, each one redolent of its connections. Its ancient name, Onchesmos, derives from Anchises, the Trojan whose union with the goddess Aphrodite on Mount Ida resulted in a son, Aeneas. Aeneas, according to many accounts, escaped the sack of Troy with his young son Ascanius and the crippled Anchises on his back – an iconic image fancifully embroidered during the late Roman Republic. Many versions of the tale survive, detailing the journey of the Trojan refugees through the central Mediterranean, and the fate of Anchises. Dionysius of Halicarnassus calls Onchesmos ‘the Harbour of Anchises’ and records that the Trojans dedicated a temple to Aphrodite here: ‘From Buthrotum, they sailed along the coast and came to a place which was then called the Harbour of Anchises but now has a less significant name; there they also built a temple to Aphrodite and then crossed the Ionian Gulf’. Aphrodite was a deity who had power over the sea and provided safety to all those who sailed. In this group were included sailors, shipowners, traders, and anyone else whose profession was involved with the sea. It was one of several Ionian temples dedicated to Aphrodite reported by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the others being at ancient Leucas and at Ambracia. It is undoubtedly this tradition that underlies the local belief, mentioned six centuries later by the Byzantine court historian Procopius, that Anchises died at Onchesmos. Other ancient authors record that Anchises died in Italy, either at Drepanum, a Greek and later Roman forebear of modern Trapani in western Sicily that was favoured by Virgil, or at Lavinium, south of Rome, according to the accounts of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Strabo; though Pausanias recounts that Anchises died in Arcadia in Greece, lending his name to Mount Anchisia.