Gjirokastër

Gjirokastër's nickname comes from its roofs as much as its walls — the old town's houses are covered almost universally in flat, heavy grey stone tiles rather than terracotta, a building tradition specific to this part of southern Albania and one that gives the hillside a uniform, fortress-like appearance found nowhere else in the country. Many of the grandest houses are traditional Ottoman-era “tower houses” (kulla), tall and narrow with defensive ground floors and more open, window-lined upper storeys for daily living, several of which are open to visitors as small house-museums showing how a wealthy Ottoman-era family actually lived across the different floors.

Gjirokastër Castle, one of the largest fortresses in the Balkans, layers a long military history — from its medieval core through Ottoman expansion — with a genuinely unexpected Cold War exhibit: a preserved American Lockheed T-33 aircraft, forced down over Albania during the Hoxha era and put on permanent display as evidence of the regime's isolation and vigilance against outside threats, displayed here as a historical artefact rather than with any political commentary. Beneath the castle, a Cold War-era tunnel complex, built as a civil-defence shelter for the local communist elite, is open for guided tours through its original corridors and rooms, a smaller-scale counterpart to Tirana's Bunk'Art museums.

Gjirokastër is the birthplace of Ismail Kadare, Albania's most internationally recognised novelist and a repeated contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature before his death, whose work — much of it set in a thinly fictionalised version of his home city — drew directly on the stone-roofed streets and tower houses of the old town he grew up in. His childhood home is preserved as a small museum, offering a literary counterpoint to the city's military and architectural history, and a useful way to understand how deeply Gjirokastër's own distinctive geography shaped one of Albania's most significant cultural exports.