[ALBSA-Info] Albanian archeology

[Agron Alibali]

Albanian archaeologists launch defensive digs

BY ANN ELDER 
Special to the Athens News 

  
[The photograph script] Nicholas Hammond pictured
after returning from three months' walking in Epiros
about 1930. "I had let my beard grow, a tawny one, so
I was known by Epirotes as 'o kokkinos lordos', he
recalls. The photo was taken outside a tent on Ithaka
when excavating the Cave of the Nymphs. Map showing
the borders between Greece and Albania, and the
location of Butrint.]  

POLITICAL stability in Albania is yearned for not
least by the country's archaeologists. If former
president Sali Berisha ceased encouraging violent
protests requiring police attention, more protection
could be given to endangered archaeological sites,
they believe. Known sites, meanwhile, are at serious
risk of being robbed. 

To counter the hazard of looting which has been on the
increase since the financial crash of 1997, a new
rescue archaeology unit was set up in Tirana in
October last year. Funded by the US Packard Humanities
Institute, which backs excavations in Greece, Italy
and Turkey, establishment of the new agency was a
response to the Nato bombing campaign in Kosovo
earlier in the year, said the director, Lorenc Bejko. 

With his Italian archaeologist wife Maria Grazia
Amore, assistant director of the unit, Bejko spent
November at the British School at Athens using library
resources to write preliminary reports on a
two-months' summer rescue excavation of a tumulus
burial site at Korce, a short distance over the Greek
border from Kastoria. 

Identified by archaeologists of the Albanian Institute
of Archaeology in the 1970s, the site lay undisturbed
for 20 years, he said. "Antiquities were safe in the
old regime. Anything found would be handed to the
authorities. There was no market for them. But after
the crash in 1997, looters attacked the Korce burial
site with bulldozers, so protection was urgent." 

Under the new rescue unit, excavation was launched
with a team of six archaeologists, a physical
anthropologist to study the human remains, 10 students
and 20 workmen with pickaxes. Remains from late
antiquity were unearthed, with Bronze Age burials
thought to be lower down. A second season's digging is
planned to begin next spring. 

Another major enterprise for the new unit has been
investigating monumental stone remains of underground
burial sites brought to light in gravel quarrying for
the Eighth Corridor. This is the Albanian stretch from
Durres on the coast to the border south of Lake Ohrid
with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)
of what is known in Greece as the new Egnatia highway
to link the Adriatic with the Bosporus. 

With European Union funding, construction work on
Albanian sections of the road is being done by a Fyrom
company, said Amore. She has led exploration of two
burial chambers much damaged by heavy machinery last
summer. The first part of the road beginning from
Durres - Venetian Durazzo, earlier Roman Dyrrhachium,
founded as a Greek colony, Epidamnus, in the seventh
century BC - follows the route of the Roman Via
Egnatia. This was the trans-Adriatic continuation to
the eastern empire, with its centre in Constantinople
after 324 AD, of the Via Appia from Rome to the coast.


Up in the hills, a paved section of the old Roman road
has been identified, Amore said. In rivers once
crossed by Roman bridges, immense stone columns still
remain, though superstructure, possibly wooden, has
vanished. From medieval days may be seen the
caldirimia (in Albania kalldrem) from when Albania was
part of the Byzantine Empire, till overrun by Serbs
led by Stefan Dushan in the mid-14th century, free
again under the hero Skanderbeg, till his death in
1467, when Ottomans under Sultan Mehmet II took over
all except Durazzo, Venetian till 1501. 

The new unit is the first attempt at rescue
archaeology in Albania, said Bejko. To meet the needs
of the market economy, the entire Albanian
archaeological service is in the throes of
reorganisation. As a member body of the Academy of
Sciences, the Institute of Archaeology previously did
excavations, but in future systematic work will be
done through the ministry of culture. 

Rescue work is done in the meantime in close
collaboration with Muzafer Korkuti, director of the
Institute of Archaeology, which employs all of
Albania's 50 archaeologists working in seven regional
offices. Main institute project just now is a survey
of the south-central region due to be crossed by the
new Egnatia highway. 

The small country is rich in archaeological sites,
many still untouched by the archaeologist's trowel.
For instance, of 30 or so hilltop settlements
identified dat ing back to antiquity, only three or
four are so far being systematically explored. 

  
Lorenc Bejko, director of the Albanian rescue
archaeology unit in Tirana, and Maria Grazia Amore,
assistant director of the unit. After the
predictability of life in Rome, the couple finds the
environment in Tirana 'stimulating and very dynamic'.
In preparation for their work they toured rescue
archaeology units in the UK and Italy. Their agency is
backed by the Packard Humanities Institute of the US. 


Reorientation to the contemporary European
archaeological viewpoint is also requiring a
significant shift, observed Bejko. Members of the
Institute of Archaeology are mostly of the older
generation, some of whom studied in Yugoslavia,
Bulgaria or Russia, before Hoxha broke off relations
with the Soviet Union under Krushchev in 1961. 

Considered the father of archaeology in Albania is
Frano Prendi, now retired, but still working
part-time. His writings have till now afforded the
only glimpse for the rest of the world of the Albanian
view of the country's past. Apart from Prendi's
contribution on Albanian prehistory in the Cambridge
Ancient History, Bejko said the most influential
treatment of Albanian ancient history is that by the
redoubtable British scholar Nicholas Hammond in his
classic work on Epiros. 

No armchair historian, Hammond, now aged 93, walked
the length and breadth of Epiros and Macedonia in the
pre-war period after his first visit in 1929. He liked
to study at first hand the terrain the ancients wrote
about, he said. His fluency in Greek and some
Albanian, plus knowledge of the region, led to his
appointment to a key position at British Military
Mission headquarters at Pendalofos in the mountains
south of Kastoria during the Second World War. Too
close an acquaintance with the man appointed head of
Albania's post-war secret police, he was forced to
postpone revisiting Albania till the 1960s, said
Bejko. 

Born and bred in Berat, a museum town of red-roofed,
white-plastered houses, Bejko studied archaeology at
Tirana University. After graduation in 1985, fluent in
English through learning the language at school from
an Albanian who had studied in China, he spent three
months at the American School of Classical Studies in
Athens, then did a diploma at the Institute of
Archaeology at the University of London under John
Wilkes, noted for his study of ancient Illyria. 

Amore, who is from Turin in northern Italy, studied
archaeology with specialisation in Magna Graecia, the
area of ancient Greek colonisation in southern Italy.
She gained experience at excavations in Calabria and
in a museum at Metaponto. The couple met at an annual
conference on Magna Graecia at Taranto and after their
marriage worked in Rome. 

Albania's prehistory dates back some 60,000 years to
Palaeolithic days, they relate. Carbon-14 dates of
43,000 years ago have been obtained from French and US
laboratories and topological evidence suggests
habitation back 60,000 years in the Komispol Cave.
Studies of stone tools indicate Neanderthal man was
active in the area prior to 100,000 years ago. 

In the late Bronze Age, Illyria, as Albania was known
in antiquity, was part of the Greek world. Oral
tradition has it settlers arrived as refugees from
Troy. Some see this as bearing out the story
immortalised by Virgil in the Aeneid. "But that is
just a legend," warns Bejko. 

At Durres are ruins of a large Roman amphitheatre and
city walls of the fifth century AD, built after the
Visigoth invasion of 481, as well as Venetian towers
used as lookouts for the dreaded Balkan pirates, the
Uskoks. 

A Greek colony dating from the sixth century BC was at
Apollonia, which still bears the same name, on the
coast between Sarande and Durres. The city became a
leading cultural centre in the days of the Roman
Republic and it was there that Julius Caesar sent this
nephew, Octavian, later the Emperor Augustus, to
finish his studies. Many statuary and pottery finds
from Roman times are in Apollonia's archaeological
museum, housed in a 13th-century Orthodox monastery. 

While in Athens, Bejko and Amore gave lectures at the
British School on recent developments in Albanian
archaeological practice. 


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