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Albania in Five Minutes
Everything you need to hold the country in your head: where it is, who lives there, what happened, and what it runs on.
En clair
These pages explain the basics — how the country is organised, how to read place names, why there are so many bunkers, and what the Kanun was.
Explicatifs
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How Albania Is Divided Up
Twelve counties, sixty-one municipalities, and the 2014 reform that abolished nearly four hundred communes.
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Reading Albanian Place Names
Why the same town appears as Vlorë and Vlora, and what the endings tell you.
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Albania's UNESCO Sites
Four inscriptions: Butrint, the historic centres of Berat and Gjirokastra, the Ohrid region, and the primeval beech…
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Why Albania Is Full of Bunkers
About 170,000 concrete domes, built by a state that had fallen out with every possible ally.
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Albania and the European Union
Candidate since 2014, negotiating since July 2022 — where the process actually stands and what the remaining steps…
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How Albania Is Governed
A parliamentary republic: a 140-seat assembly, a prime minister who governs, and a president elected by parliament.
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Albania's Population
The 2023 census recorded a resident population far below the 2011 count — the clearest measure of three decades of…
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Albania's Climate Zones
Mediterranean on the coast, continental inland, alpine in the north — three climates in a country 340 km long.
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Albania's Geography
Twenty-eight thousand square kilometres, seventy per cent of it hills and mountains, and a coast that changes…
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Albania's Ancient Civilisations
Illyrians, Greek colonists and Rome, layered on the same coastline for a thousand years.
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Understanding the Kanun
A body of customary law that governed the northern highlands for centuries — and the part of it that everyone has…
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Albanian Names
Why so many Albanians are called Skender, and what a surname tells you about where a family comes from.
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Money, Prices and the Lek
A currency most visitors never see quoted, in a country where a lot of prices are in euros.
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Religion in Albania, Explained
Four communities, centuries of coexistence, twenty-three years of total prohibition, and a census question nobody…