Where 100 Families Still Live Behind Medieval Walls

The morning call to prayer drifts up from the valley as I climb the worn limestone steps to Berat Castle. An elderly woman in a floral housedress waters geraniums on her doorstep—not in some reconstructed heritage village, but inside a functioning 2,400-year-old fortress where her family has lived for five centuries.

This is what sets Beratit apart from every other castle you’ll visit in Europe. While tourists shuffle through empty halls in Edinburgh or Heidelberg, here in jugut të Shqipërisë, children kick footballs against Byzantine church walls and neighbors share morning coffee on Ottoman-era porches. The castle isn’t preserved; it’s lived in.

The Climb Through Centuries

The approach from Mangalem quarter takes about fifteen minutes on foot—steep enough to make you appreciate why armies struggled to capture this place. The cobblestones, polished smooth by countless feet, date from different eras: massive Illyrian blocks at the foundation, Byzantine repairs in alternating stone and brick, Ottoman patches where needed. Your hand traces the same walls that Skanderbeg’s soldiers tried to scale in 1455, losing 5,000 men in a single catastrophic day.

The main gate appears suddenly around a sharp turn. Built in the 13th century by Michael I Komnenos Doukas, it still bears his red brick monogram—a Byzantine signature of ownership that would have meant little to the Ottoman soldiers who later passed through, or the Italian troops who photographed themselves here in 1939, or the communist partisans who made it their stronghold.

Two men sit playing dominoes in the shade of the entrance arch. One nods a greeting; the other offers directions in a mix of Albanian and enthusiastic hand gestures, mentioning his family has operated the small café here for three generations.

A Fortress That Refuses to Become a Museum

Inside the walls, the first surprise is how normal everything feels. Laundry flutters from lines strung between medieval towers. A tabby cat sleeps on a Byzantine wall. The sound of a television news broadcast escapes through an open window. This ordinariness, paradoxically, is what makes Berat Castle extraordinary.

The paths wind without apparent logic—this was never a planned city but an organic growth over millennia. You turn a corner and stumble upon the Church of the Holy Trinity, its 14th-century dome distinctive with red brick banding. Now the Onufri Museum, it houses icons painted with a red pigment whose formula died with the master in the 16th century. Scientists have analyzed it repeatedly; they still can’t reproduce that particular crimson.

The museum guard points out details tourists miss: how Onufri painted individual eyelashes on his saints, how his reds seem to glow from within. ‘He was revolutionary,’ she explains, ‘bringing emotion to faces that had been stylized for centuries.’ Her favorite is a small icon of St. Nicholas where the saint appears almost to be suppressing a smile—humanization that would have shocked earlier Byzantine artists.

The Weight of Stones and Stories

Each empire left its architectural signature here. The Illyrian foundations use blocks that Evliya Çelebi, visiting in 1670, described as “big as the body of an elephant.” They’re not quite that large, but running your hand across their surface, you understand the exaggeration. These stones have supported everything built above for over two millennia.

Të Roman destruction in 200 BC should have ended Berat’s story. Livy records that Lucius Apustius “killed the men of military age, granted all plunder to the soldiers, demolished the walls and burned the city.” Yet within a generation, it was rebuilt. The Romans understood what every subsequent conqueror would learn: this position, controlling the Osum valley and the routes between the Adriatic and Macedonia, was too valuable to abandon.

Byzantine Emperor Justinian reinforced it in the 6th century as part of his Balkan defense system. The Bulgarians renamed it Beligrad—”White City”—when they controlled it from the 9th to 11th centuries. The Serbs under Stefan Dušan took it in 1345. Each transition violent, yet somehow the place absorbed these changes, continued, endured.

Water, Wine, and Daily Rhythms

The castle’s ancient cistern drops six meters below ground, still partially functional after two millennia. Recent excavations uncovered ilire wells even older, their stone linings still intact. Water management here was sophisticated before Rome was an empire. The engineers who designed this system understood something modern city planners often forget: survival depends on water, especially under siege.

In one of the 200-year-old guesthouses, the owner shows me her cellar where a natural spring emerges from the rock. ‘During komunizmit, when the town water failed, we always had this,’ she says.

Her breakfast room overlooks the valley where morning mist clings to the Osum River. She serves tavë kosi—lamb and yogurt baked with eggs—with bread still warm from her neighbor’s oven. This neighbor, it turns out, has been baking bread in the same stone oven for forty years, as did her mother before her.

The UNESCO Dilemma

In 2008, Berat gained Trashëgimia Botërore e UNESCO-s status, recognizing its “Outstanding Universal Value.” This brought funding, attention, and complications. The site management plan remains incomplete despite repeated UNESCO warnings. The entire Heritage Institute team recently departed, leaving conservation efforts in limbo.

Walking the ramparts, you see the challenges. Some sections of the walls, damaged in Albania’s 2019 earthquake—magnitude 6.4, the strongest in forty years—await repair. Illegal construction from the late 1990s intrudes on buffer zones. Yet somehow the castle absorbs these modern insults as it absorbed ancient ones.

The real threat isn’t earthquakes or poor planning but success. Tourism has quadrupled in recent years. Summer brings 14,000 visitors monthly to a space that once held, at its peak, 6,000 residents. The narrow streets weren’t designed for tour groups. The Byzantine churches weren’t meant to echo with camera clicks.

Twilight Conversations

Evening is when the castle returns to its residents. Tour groups descend to their hotels in the lower town. The ticket booth (300 lek, about €3, though often unmanned) closes. Families emerge onto terraces and doorsteps.

An elderly resident pours homemade raki and talks about changes. ‘My grandfather knew every stone, every family, every story. I know maybe half. My children?’ He shrugs. His daughter lives in Tiranë, his son in Athens. The castle population has dropped from thousands to barely a hundred families.

Yet he’s not pessimistic. “Albanians always leave and always return,” he says. “My son calls every week about renovating our old stable into a guesthouse. Tourism brings problems but also brings our children home.”

The Mountains Remember

From the castle heights, Mount Tomorr dominates the eastern horizon, Mount Shpirag the west. Local legend says these peaks were once brothers who fought over a beautiful woman named Osum. They killed each other in their fury; the gods transformed them into mountains and her tears became the river that winds between them.

It’s a story that explains the landscape while encoding deeper truths about conflict, loss, and the permanence of geography versus the transience of human ambition. Every empire that took this castle eventually fell, but the mountains remain, the river still flows, and families still tell the story to their children.

Practical Truths for Modern Visitors

Visit early morning or late afternoon when heat and crowds diminish. Wear sturdy shoes—the cobblestones are treacherous when worn smooth. The climb from town takes 10-15 minutes but feels longer in summer heat. Bring water.

Të Muzeu Onufri merits the separate entrance fee. The Church of the Holy Trinity offers the best valley views. The Red Mosque’s minaret can be climbed but requires nerve—the stairs are narrow and dark.

Several families run simple cafés and guesthouses within the walls. Staying overnight transforms the experience. You wake to roosters, not tour buses. You see the castle as residents do: not a monument but a neighborhood, ancient and ordinary at once.

What Survives

Berat Castle endures because it adapted. When the bizantinët needed a fortress, it became one. When the Ottomans required a garrison town, it transformed. Under communism, it housed workers. Now it serves tourists while sheltering the families who never left.

This adaptability—not its walls or towers—constitutes its true strength. The castle demonstrates that heritage isn’t about freezing time but about continuous inhabitation, each generation adding its layer while maintaining what matters.

Standing on the ramparts as darkness falls, watching lights kindle in the valleys below, you understand why this place has been continuously inhabited for 2,400 years. It’s not the strategic position, though that helps. It’s not the defensive walls, though they protected. It’s that humans found a way to make life here, through conquest and earthquake, empire and revolution.

The castle’s hundred remaining families carry this forward. Their laundry on medieval walls, their televisions in Ottoman rooms, their children playing where Illyrian children played—this is what makes Berat Castle irreplaceable. Not the stones, remarkable as they are, but the unbroken chain of daily life stretching back to before Rome ruled the world.

Tomorrow the tour buses will come again. Guides will explain the architectural periods, the museum hours, the photo opportunities. But tonight, the castle belongs to its residents, as it has for a hundred generations, as it will, if we’re careful and lucky, for a hundred more.

Visiting Information: Berat Castle opens daily during daylight hours. Entry: 300 lek (€3). The Onufri Museum requires separate admission. Regular buses connect Berat with Tirana (2.5 hours). The castle quarter has guesthouses, cafés, and craft shops. April-June and September-October offer ideal weather with fewer crowds.