Iris inimitably has managed a small miracle. My son and I are in Dhërmi to visit Grama Bay. It is her present for my son’s first day in Albania. Blue miles of water await.
Romeo captains a low-slung zephyr, bobbing in the gentle swell offshore, beneath a gargantuan new hotel complex. The hotel is part of the spreading vacation homes now occupying the slopes overlooking Palassa sands at the northernmost limit of the Albanian Riviera. Here Caesar landed in 49-48 BC to confront his former ally, Pompey. Caesar’s legions trudged up over the Llogara Pass and descended by stealth to take the port-town of Orikum on Vlora Bay in the shadow of the long Karaburun Peninsula. Battle was to ensue further north at Dyrrachium.
I will always remember the first time I took this road from Orikum. One minute we were on the Mediterranean in all its dazzling colour; the next, an hour later, we were beside alpine chalets in the narrow pass below the unforgiving penumbra of the Acroceraunian Mountains, rising to 1,500m. These mountains are curiously well known in the West. Percy Shelley opens his poem, ‘Arethusa’, with a reference to this repudiating massif:
An oncoming archaeological crisis in universities