Italy is in lockdown as I write and it feels like Christmas Day, such is the silence. Yet the cuckoos have dodged passport control and are here to herald each day. The fields, incidentally, are now flush with spring flowers. The government decree forbids travel, so I resort to assembling reports on old excavations for a new tome and, as it takes shape, I dwell on whom to dedicate it to. Archaeology is as much about people as it is about the past. So, just as I rework interpretations about past discoveries with each new piece of evidence, so I inevitably revise my thinking about people.
This brings me to my dedication of this book: improbable as it seems, in this isolation I realise the obvious dedicatee is Ç, someone whom 25 years ago I judged to be Mephistopheles. Topsy-turvy? Isolation madness? No. Slowly I have come to appreciate how alien I must have seemed to Ç in 1995. Now, I realise he deserves this dedication for having devoted his life as an archaeologist to the place in question: Butrint, in southern Albania. But, 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.
Balkan chess
Beginning our second full year at Butrint – ancient Buthrotum – meant entering a new round of negotiations about the terms of excavating. We had launched the excavations in 1994 with great optimism thanks to support from the Butrint Foundation charity. This arcadian site on the Straits of Corfu, with its great Graeco-Roman ruins (notably a theatre, temples, forum, cemeteries, and fortifications) and many medieval monuments, was a sublime opportunity – except that, even with government agreements, our Institute of Archaeology colleagues in Albania refused to let us dig. Our agreement was to permit us to excavate the Roman and later Roman Triconch Palace as well as around the 6th-century Baptistery with its iconic mosaic pavement. Instead, we were inducted into Balkan chess, learning to divide and rule.
