Food
Byrek
The everyday Albanian pie: hand-stretched pastry layered with cheese, spinach, leek, meat or tomato.
In plain language
This section is about how people in Albania live, speak, eat and celebrate.
Food
Food
Tavë Kosi
Lamb baked under a set custard of yoghurt, egg and a little flour — the dish most often named as Albania's national one.
Food
Fërgesë
Peppers and tomato cooked down with white cheese, sometimes with liver — a Tirana staple.
Food
Flija
Concentric crepe layers built up one at a time under a hot metal lid — a northern highland dish that takes hours.
Food
Tarator
Chilled yoghurt with cucumber, garlic, walnut and dill — the standard Albanian summer starter.
Food
Albanian Olive Oil
Oil from Kalinjot, Kokërrmadh and other local varieties, chiefly from Vlorë, Fier and Berat.
Wine and drink
Drink
Raki
Home-distilled grape or plum spirit, offered to guests and made in most rural households.
Drink
Albanian Wine
A wine culture running back to Illyrian times, rebuilt after 1990 around native grapes.
Drink
Shesh i Bardhë and Shesh i Zi
Albania's signature white and red grapes, grown mainly around Tirana and Durrës.
Drink
Albanian Coffee Culture
Albania has among the highest densities of coffee bars in Europe; the meeting is the point, not the drink.
Subjects
Subject
The Albanian Language
An independent branch of the Indo-European family with no close living relative, written in a 36-letter Latin alphabet.
Subject
Besa
The customary obligation of keeping one's word — the principle behind Albania's wartime sheltering of Jewish refugees.
Subject
Religion in Albania
Four historic communities — Sunni, Bektashi, Orthodox and Catholic — and a state that banned all of them from 1967 to 1990.
Subject
The Bektashi Order
A Sufi order whose world headquarters has been in Tirana since 1925, with a major shrine on Mount Tomorr.
Subject
The Albanian Orthodox Church
An autocephalous church since 1937, rebuilt almost from nothing after 1991.
Subject
The Albanian Flag and the Double-Headed Eagle
A black double-headed eagle on red — Skanderbeg's standard, and one of the oldest continuously used national symbols in Europe.
Subject
The Albanian Alphabet
Thirty-six letters agreed at the Congress of Monastir in 1908, replacing competing Arabic, Greek and Latin scripts.
Subject
The Arbëresh
Albanian-speaking communities in southern Italy, settled from the 15th century and still speaking an archaic Tosk.
Subject
The Albanian Diaspora
More Albanians may live outside the country than in it — chiefly in Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the US.
Subject
Albanian Cuisine
Mediterranean at the coast, Balkan and Ottoman inland, dairy-heavy in the mountains.
Subject
Basic Albanian Phrases
The forty or so words and phrases that cover most day-to-day exchanges for a visitor.
Subject
Albanian Culture
A culture shaped by mountain isolation, five centuries of Ottoman rule, and fifty years of enforced separation.
Subject · Vlorë
Sazan Island
Albania's largest island: a former Italian and then Soviet-era military base at the mouth of the Bay of Vlorë.
Subject · Durrës
Cape of Rodon
A low cape north of Durrës holding Skanderbeg's sea castle and the church of St Anthony.
Subject · Vlorë
The Albanian Riviera
The 120 km of Ionian coast between the Llogara pass and Sarandë, where the Ceraunian mountains fall straight into the sea.
Subject · Vlorë
Zvërnec Island
A cypress-covered island in the Narta lagoon holding a 13th–14th-century Orthodox monastery.
Subject
The History of Albania
Illyrian kingdoms, Roman roads, five Ottoman centuries, twenty-eight years of independence, forty-six years of the strictest…
Subject
The Sigurimi
The Directorate of State Security: the secret police of communist Albania, and the institution the House of Leaves museum was…
Subject
The Albanian Economy
An upper-middle-income economy of roughly $30 billion, led by services and tourism, with remittances and construction close…
Subject
The Via Egnatia
Rome's road from the Adriatic to Byzantium, which began at Durrës and Apollonia.
Subject · Vlorë
Karaburun Peninsula
Albania's largest uninhabited peninsula, closed to the public for most of the 20th century and now a marine park.
Subject · Korçë
Drilon Springs
Spring-fed canals and plane trees on the Ohrid shore east of Pogradec.