Butrint is eternal. It owes a priceless debt to Virgil’s Aeneid: the exiled hero from Troy, Aeneas, pauses here on the way to found Rome. At a stroke, Butrint was on the world map. Virgil’s choice of Butrint – ‘a Troy in miniature’ – was no accident. As a member of Augustus’s new Imperial court at Rome, he was paying personal tribute to the Emperor’s right-hand man, Admiral Agrippa, whose first wife came from Butrint. With such serendipity, this place has been forever sealed in aspic, at least until our era.
For most visitors today, however, Butrint conjures up an entirely different experience. It is the ‘Other’, a paradise, a place in a Homeric landscape, somewhere simply and pleasantly timeless. It was extraordinarily beautiful when Enver Hoxha’s infernal regime collapsed in 1991; quite unforgettable when I first ventured here in 1993; and remains a precious oasis within the mayhem of modern Albania today. Returning to visit the new excavations, the glorious assault on one’s senses is as powerful as ever. You need know nothing about Aeneas to be seduced by the shimmering reflections off the lagoon, or to fall in love with the shafts of sparkling light on the monuments, filtered by the woodland canopy where golden orioles flit through the foliage like tropical parrots. Butrint really fits our new global ideals of a UNESCO World Heritage Site – it was inscribed in 1992.
On a mission
I first came here at the suggestion of the British ambassador in Rome. Lord Rothschild and his friend Lord Sainsbury were seeking an archaeologist to dig the site. Together, the lords had created a foundation after briefly visiting this erstwhile pariah state. As for me, I had always wanted to excavate a Classical port on the Mediterranean: being at the crossroads of the Mare Nostrum, this promised to be the opportunity of a lifetime. Then reality intruded.
Monumental voyages