By Richard Hodges
It is 2013; I have returned reluctantly to Butrint.
Why my reluctance? Because I remember how beautiful Butrint was. A place with a spirit that transcended the centuries. A place that was magical, so exquisite that like some extraordinary secret it drew tens of thousands of tourists. No more! This precious glory of the Mediterranean has been trashed! ‘Greed, which led first to a lack of investment as the resources and potential of the Park were frittered away by maladministration and then, wretchedly, by the construction of a new road in 2010 and all that followed in 2011 and 2012. With what result? Now in 2013: no longer eternal; simply mediocre; and many fewer tourists.
I first visited Butrint in 1993. Albania was starving. But my Albanian guides over breakfast told me with pride that today would be one of the great days of my life. These guides had long worked at Butrint and I wondered if its sylvan charms in contrast to the sad decline of communist Albania had caused them to exaggerate. I listened to them with a certain skepticism. I was wrong!
It was a floating landscape. Never before had I experienced such shimmering scenes, beckoning to my curiosity as an archaeologist. Now, twenty years later I was realize I was being seduced by the alchemy of mesmerizing and, in many respects, intangible, worlds. This passing moment was eclipsed by the long span of the lake and the hills beyond as we gingerly followed the road carved into the contours of the hill and then, like magic, passed safely into olive groves on sharp terraces tumbling down to the mouth of the Straits of Corfu. In a split second the spectrum of our gaze switched from the Balkan interior to the sunlit Ionian Sea. This was Ksamili. As a seamark this was then a gaggle of tawdry tower blocks and a half-cocked hotel – the Sea Eagle – on top of a bluff before a majestic sparkling bay with green islands. I looked for tourists as we silently slipped through the olive and citrus groves, but apart from pigs contentedly foraging it was empty. Hewn olive trees, cut for firewood, soon outnumbered the standing ones. It was the peasants, my guide uneasily said, who had wickedly felled the trees. We then turned sharply, the driver braking at the crest of the hill as the road began its descent alongside the Vivari Channel far below us. Before us lay the polished Channel, partly obscured by the drifting pall of mist. A castle guarded one side. From here, I recalled, Ottomans had issued forth in the dead of night to surprise the Venetian defenders on this side. The Venetian guard had been bribed ahead of time, but his comrades resisted the attack and strung up their treacherous colleague. Beyond the fortress lay a plain criss-crossed with dykes, and then the rolling hills fusing into a shapely triangular hill – ancient Kestrine, supposedly founded by Kestrinos, the blessed progeny of the Trojan exiles, Andromache and Helenus – before the curtain of mountains. The scene was muted. Nothing moved. It possessed the serenity of a lost valley, every part burnt a shade of gold as the sun pressed upwards over the high distant ranges. Then a surprise. At a sharp shoulder above the Channel, immediately below a Medieval watch-tower, the wooded hill of ancient Buthrotum came into view. The dark throng of trees could not have been more unexpected in this landscape shorn of woods and greenery. Here, then, was the oasis, snuck between the sea and mountains, that provided succour to the Trojan exile, Aeneas, on his voyage to Rome.
My guide turned and fixed us with a mischievous grin. Pleased as punch with the morning weather and uncharacteristically unguarded in anticipation of our approval of the place. Ignoring him, as we slowed to a halt in front of the paint-chipped iron gates to the ancient city, I cast my mind back to the pile of books I had leafed through about Albania’s only well-known archaeological site.
Gazing out from here, I felt a disquieting emptiness. The day was brightening to be blissful after a week of storms. Yet this place was ominously trapped between worlds. Corfu was clearly visible to the west, flush with affluence. To the east, beyond the triangular point of Kestrine (Cuka i Aitoit – Eagle Mountain), the heart of Epirus lay in a virtual darkness. The liminality of the place soon engaged us. My guide had not exaggerated. I will never forget the beauty of this place. Here I empathized with Hugh of St. Victor’s dictum:
The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his’.
Ah! Butrint 1993. But twenty years have passed:
Now in 2013 Butrint has lost its soul? The Butrint National Park was founded in 1999 explicitly to protect this majestic magic. An international workshop at Saranda in 1998 funded by the Getty Foundation involving archaeologists and administrators from Tirana as well as Unesco delegates had reached unimanity: Butrint’s peerless spirit must be protected at all costs. With this dictum the Butrint National Park was created. New roads were to be diverted around the park. New development was to be avoided. Encouraging the resurrection of Butrint as a place where tourists might find another world was our shared goal. For a decade it survived this way. 75000 tourists a year found a blissful empathy with this great and unexpected place. Until the greed became too much.
Greed. The park’s paths built in 2005 have now been abandoned. The wooden footbridges have disappeared. Worse, the woodland canopy over the ruins has largely gone. Denuded by Dutch Elm Disease, only the diminutive olives planted by the headstones of famous visitors remain, testimony to the obsequious political fashions. The museum finished in 2005 with huge grants no longer opens regularly, its lights all fused, damp causing the objects to decay.
But worse! Encouraged by the bus-loads of tourists, all paying ticket revenue (300,000 euros per year) that found its way into myriad pockets, the Tirana authorities have driven a huge ugly road through the olives between Ksamili and Butrint, obliterating any magic. Carved down the hillside is a bigger gash, worthy of an autostrada. How Aeneas might weep. How Ali Pasha would damn the greed of these insensitive administrators. And, in front of Butrint itself, an asphalted car park as though this was the forecourt of a new supermarket in the periphery of Tirana. Here too the tacky trinket stalls of the third world.
Worse, in 2012 they built an ugly concrete bridge across the channel to permit the big Benzs and BMVs to accelerate across to Cape Styllo and, where a sublime unique wilderness existed, there are now gated villas, all awaiting completion because there someone forgot to organize any water supply. Unoccupied villas of Tirana’s klans. Greed; more greed!
So eternal Butrint, glorious since the age of Aeneas and Augustus has succumbed to the senseless greed of a government that prostituted its one great world-class treasure to benefit a few administrators. As I write this postcard in the summer of 2013 I can only imagine how utterly horrific Butrint will be in 2023. When was it too late? When could this folly have been stopped. In March 2010 there was a need for a vision that respected the importance of Butrint for Albania. The road under construction to Ksamili could have been stopped. Visitors to Butrint could have parked in Ksamili bringing economic benefit to the village. The Park could have promoted the beautiful landscape around Butrint as well as the ancient site itself. Even in March or early April 2010, this vandalism could have been stopped and the damage repaired. After that it was too late. Greed won; Albania and the world lost.
