TIRANA, July 16 – A handicraft, book and business fair, exhibitions by local artists, traditional and contemporary music festival, theatrical and DJ performances will make the southern UNESCO town of Berat a destination of multicultural events for three days.
Organizers of this year’s second edition of the multicultural festival have already announced a tight calendar of events scheduled for July 23 to 25. The festival increases interest to visit Berat, a UNESCO World Heritage site which has been recommended as a top undiscovered tourist attraction by several prestigious agencies this year, at a time when Albania is already in its peak tourist season and thousands of foreigners are visiting the country.
In last year’s inaugural edition, the cultural, ethnographic and architectural heritage of Berat, known as “the city of 1,001 windows” were showcased for three days in late August in the first multicultural festival promoting this popular international destination which since 2008 has been a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Alba Çela, a native of Berat, described the festival in an article published on Tirana Times as “an attempt to mix and stir history with modernity through art and entertainment.
“The Berat Multicultural Festival 2014 combined the natural attraction of the city with the glamour of music, painting, video art and with the sweet charm of social activities,” she wrote.
Since 2008, Berat has been inscribed as a rare example of an architectural character typical of the Ottoman period. Located in southwestern Albania, Berat bears witness to a town which was fortified but open, and was over a long period inhabited by craftsmen and merchants. Its urban centre reflects a vernacular housing tradition of the Balkans, examples of which date mainly from the late 18th and the 19th centuries. This tradition has been adapted to suit the town’s life styles, with tiered houses on the slopes, which are predominantly horizontal in layout, and make abundant use of the entering daylight, says UNESCO in its description of Berat.
