Historic Centres of Berat and Gjirokastra

Ottoman-era Albania survives most vividly in two hillside towns. Gjirokastra, stone-roofed above the Drinos valley, is famed for its fortified two-storey houses of the 17th century and its old bazaar; Berat stacks Byzantine churches and Ottoman mosques beneath a castle whose walls are largely 13th-century, on foundations reaching back to the 4th century BC. Gjirokastra was inscribed by UNESCO in 2005, and Berat joined the World Heritage listing three years later.