Berat, Albania

Go to Berat if you'd like to be looked after.

Albanians have a word for what a host owes a guest. Besa comes from the Kanun, the old legal code of the northern mountains, and it means keeping the promise. A host is responsible for a guest's safety and comfort before almost anything else. The novelist Ismail Kadare called the guest “the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations.”

Albania is the only European country whose Jewish population was larger at the end of World War II than before it, because Albanian families took people in and refused to give them up. Berat has a plaque marking the street where its Jewish community once lived, many descended from Spanish families who fled the Inquisition.

In practice, besa looks like what you’d expect from a truly conscientious host. A guesthouse owner holds breakfast when someone comes down late, and a man who asked for directions walks the visitor all the way to the door. Food arrives that nobody ordered.

The Guesthouse Table

This matters most to anyone traveling alone, and many solo women describe Berat as one of the most comfortable places to travel in Albania. The old town is small enough to learn in an afternoon and easy to walk after dark. Most guesthouses are family businesses, and meals often blur the line between host and guest. As one recent writer put it, “eating alone on a terrace overlooking the castle feels completely normal.”

The town fits into a day on foot. Mangalem and Gorica face one another across the Osum River, one historically Muslim with its white Ottoman houses, the other historically Christian beneath red-tiled roofs, connected by a single bridge that takes two minutes to cross. People here have lived within sight of each other's mosques and churches for centuries and made it work. Walking those neighborhoods is a lesson in coexistence.

Climb to the fortress, and you find a neighborhood. Several hundred people still live inside the walls, with laundry hanging from balconies, children playing in the lanes and gates left open because residents need to get home. There aren't many castles left where daily life still unfolds behind the ramparts.

The old cathedral inside those walls holds Onufri's sixteenth-century icons, famous for a luminous red his successors never quite reproduced. Part of their power is that they survived at all. When Albania declared itself an atheist state and confiscated religious property, someone hid them.

Dinner runs about five to ten euros. A guesthouse room is 15 to 25 euros.

Four Nights in Berat

Build ten or twelve days around it. Fly into Tirana and spend a night at each end of the trip. Berat is less than two hours south. From there, continue to Gjirokastër, the stone city, for two nights exploring its fortress and old bazaar, then on to Saranda and the Albanian Riviera. Twenty minutes beyond Saranda lies Butrint, a Greek colony that became a Roman city before being reclaimed by the marshes, its theater still standing. The Blue Eye spring is along the way, and Corfu is an easy ferry ride if it fits your flights home. With two weeks, head north as well to Shkodër, the Koman ferry, and the mountain villages of Theth and Valbona. Rent a car. Traveling south from Berat by bus means doubling back through Vlorë.

Nearly every version of that itinerary gives Berat one night, and plenty of visitors come as a day trip from Tirana. Both towns empty in the late afternoon when the buses leave.

Give Berat four nights and let the rest of the route flex around it.

That's the real reason to come. Stay four nights instead of one, and the difference shows up around the third morning. Breakfast runs long, and conversations pick up where they left off the day before. The woman running the guesthouse knows how you take your coffee and has an opinion about where you went yesterday.

Go in May or late September. Albania is booming as a destination, with international arrivals rising from fewer than four million in 2014 to about twelve million today, but most visitors still concentrate on the coast during the summer months. Berat sees little of that traffic.

Around six each evening, the town comes outside for the xhiro, the traditional evening walk. Eat late and join in.