Berat Castle
Inhabited hilltop citadel above the Osum, with Byzantine churches and Ottoman-era houses inside its walls.
Berat Castle crowns a rocky hill some 200 metres above the right bank of the Osum, and forms the core of the UNESCO-listed historic centre of Berat. Fortification began under the Illyrian Parthini in the fourth century BC; the Romans burned the stronghold around 200 BC, and the walls were rebuilt by Theodosius II in the fifth century AD and again by Justinian I in the sixth. The Despot of Epirus, Michael I Komnenos Doukas, reconstructed the defences in the thirteenth century, and his monogram in red brick can still be picked out in the masonry.
What sets the castle apart is that it never emptied. Families still live inside the walls in whitewashed stone houses along cobbled lanes, alongside the remains of roughly twenty Orthodox churches, most of them raised in the thirteenth century. The Church of the Holy Trinity, Saint Mary of Blachernae, Saint Michael and Saint Theodore survive, several carrying work by the icon painters Onufri, Kostandin Shpataraku and the Zografi brothers. The Cathedral of the Dormition of Saint Mary houses the Onufri iconographic museum, and ruins of an Ottoman mosque stand near the summit.
Highlights
- UNESCO-listed citadel still inhabited by Berat families
- Thirteenth-century brick monogram of Michael I Komnenos Doukas
- Around twenty Byzantine Orthodox churches within the walls
- Wide views over the Osum valley and the Mangalem quarter
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