Albania Increasingly In The Tourist Spot Map

TIRANA, April 21 – Last year St-Tropez, this year… Saranda, that is what an international media outlet starts a story writing about easyCruiseOne, a ship that visits the Albanian Riviera for the first time – and is swept away by the experience.
One easily sees the country has still to make a lot of efforts to accommodate ‘properly’ a tourist ship and tourists. But it is an undiscovered place, interesting to many in the globe.
A sleek navy-and-white ship, with a discreet but distinctive orange stripe along its side, glided towards the Albanian port of Saranda: easyCruiseOne had arrived, bringing the era of low-cost cruising to this former Stalinist enclave.
The harbor hardly looked able to cope; we docked, after much shouting of instructions from the Greek crew to Albanian port workers, at a concrete platform under a crane that looked ready to hoist us ashore. Although the hydrofoil that links Saranda with Corfu was moored alongside us, the place appeared better equipped to deal with freight than human cargo.
The town, as far as any of us could see from the deck, looked only partially built. Half-constructed hotels and apartment buildings dotted the landscape, though with little sign of life.
Visiting Albania was the main attraction for many of the passengers on this voyage – but we were not here for Saranda. We’d docked in southern Albania’s biggest town to visit Butrint, an archaeological site a few miles to the south. A Greek city from around the fifth century BC, it was developed by the Romans and later occupied by Byzantines, Bulgarians, Venetians, French and Ottomans before being abandoned in the 18th century.
The road from Saranda to Butrint was built for a visit by the Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in 1959, who recommended turning the ancient city into a submarine base. Luckily, it has been excavated and is protected.
A walk around the site reveals a city of considerable size. Building began at the top of the hill with an acropolis larger than the one in Athens, and over the years construction continued downhill. There are walls from the Greek times, a Roman bathhouse, a vast early Christian basilica, a tower and castle that were the work of the Venetians. Most of the remains are shrouded in vegetation, which gives them an ethereal quality, as if covered in green dustsheets.