Travelogue 5 – Apollonia to Berat We stopped along the road after leaving Gjirokastër for a post-breakfast treat at a small bakery across from this long-abandoned factory. The dry semi-sweet cookies were more interesting than good, but the factory itself was worth the stop. Its sign, rarely seen today but common during the country’s Communist past, declared the glory of Marxism and Leninism. The sign on this abandoned building touted Marxism and Leninism. Our first destination was the ruins of Apollonia, an ancient city founded in 588 BC by Greek colonists. It was the most important of the several classical towns known as Apollonia and flourished in the Roman period only to decline in the 3rd century AD when its harbor started silting up as a result of an earthquake. The Monument of Agonothetes at Apollonia is impressive. While this site is more impressive to scholars than casual tourists, it also has an interesting more modern history dating from the 18th century when it was "rediscovered" and eventually investigated by archaeologists led by Frenchman Leon Rey in the 1920’s. There have been subsequent excavations, but abundant pottery shards and other ancient debris are ubiquitous. Ancient pottery shards littered old digs around the site. After a tour of the ruins, we visited the 13th-century Monastery of Apollonia and its associated Archaeological Museum, where Enea provided expert exhibit-by-exhibit commentary. The 13th-century Church of Saint Mary stands at the heart of the monastery. This beautiful iconographic panel was in the monastery. Is this a well-endowed fertility symbol? Upon leaving the museum we returned to the Ardenica restaurant, which we visited earlier in the trip, for a lunch of grilled vegetables and frog legs. The latter is not a traditional Albanian dish, but it has become popular. The breaded and fried frog legs were very tasty. We enjoyed breaded frog legs, Albanian style. After lunch, we visited the Orthodox Monastery of Ardenica, which is famous for its church with a wooden carved altar and the colorful frescoes. While it was turned into a military barracks in 1995, it is now largely restored. The Monastery of Ardenica had beautiful flowers. These were some of the icons at the Monastery of Ardenica. We drove on to Berat, Albania’s 9th largest town and a UN World Heritage Site known for its unique architecture. We had had a long day and so just checked into our hotel, had a dinner with a nice local red on the hotel’s open-air terrace, worked a bit on this travelogue, and turned in. The next morning, we walked around the old neighborhood of Mangalem in the medieval center of town. Berat’s many churches and mosques have been influenced by the several civilizations that have coexisted here for centuries. A remarkable aspect of the local culture is that a version of Islam practiced in Berat was remarkably liberal to the extent of allowing inter-faith marriages between Muslims and Christians. We visited the simple 15th-century King (or Sultan) Bayezid Mosque, an attractive structure but with a rather simple interior, that still serves as a social gathering place for the town’s older faithful. We also went into the nearby Halveti Teqe, an even plainer house, built in 1782 for Ahmet Kurt Pasha of the Khalwati order, a Sufi sect. The 15th-century Sultan Bayezid Mosque is in Berat, Albania. Berat is known as “the city of a thousand windows”. We noticed that all of the windows on both sides of the Osum River, which runs through the old part of town, seemed to have the same vertical aspect ratio. The river-front of the old town of Berat has “a thousand windows”. After our walk around the old town, we drove up to the nearby 4th-century BC fortress and visited the Christian Orthodox Cathedral and its Byzantine Onufri Icon Gallery. The gallery has one of the best collections of Byzantine icons in Albania. Icons are particularly significant in Albania, as they were the principal medium of artistic expression during the 500 years of Ottoman occupation. The 17th-century icons in the Christian Orthodox Cathedral of Onufri are well-preserved. By this point in the trip we had tasted several Albanian wines and were looking forward to visiting the Çobo winery, one of the best in the country. We enjoyed generous tastings of two whites and three reds. The wines were produced from unfamiliar local grape varieties that were usually used for the production of raki, a strong distilled spirt and a popular national drink, generally made from grapes. The whites had significant fruit and were pleasantly dry. While not exactly our idea of sipping wines, we enjoyed them with feta cheese. The three reds, served with olives and a hard cheese, were well-made, quite dry, and very enjoyable. The last wine, an E kuqja e Beratit, was the best red we have tasted in Albania, and would have been an excellent accompaniment to hearty Albanian lamb and beef dishes. We were also served a glass of the winery’s own raki. This slightly sweet, anis-flavor drink is served as an aperitif and was somewhat similar in taste to slightly flavored Italian grappa. We enjoyed chatting with the proprietress, and her charming 17-year-old daughter, Ermira, a high school sophomore who spoke excellent English. As we left the winery, Enea presented us with a bottle of Çobo Shesh I zi, which we will enjoy later in the trip. We visited the barrel room at Çobo winery with riddling racks for their recently introduced sparkling vintage. Our last day in Albania was spent mainly driving to the city of Ohrid, Macedonia, where we will spend the next two nights. We stopped along the way and visited a roadside market, which takes place once a week. The large market had a hundred or more venders selling a wide range of goods: many varieties of nursery plants, fresh vegetables, plump bags of various grains, hardware, and clothing. Some of the more interesting items included wooden butter churns, donkey harnesses, and a large bear- size steel trap, which the seller happily demonstrated. Enea told us that many Albanian families churn their own butter. We also saw a large new still used for making raki, which is perfectly legal in Albania. Large and small wooden butter churns were on offer at a roadside market near Poshnje. .