[ALBSA-Info] The Economist on Butrint

[Kreshnik Bejko]

Mediterranean archaeology

Butrint preserved
Aug 16th 2001 | SARANDA, ALBANIA
>From The Economist print edition

Not long ago, Albania's archaeological sites were ill-kept or abandoned. Now 
they are helping to revive the economy





WHEN Aeneas was on his way to ancient Italy, he stopped at a settlement on 
the coast opposite the island of Corfu. There, according to Virgil, he saw 
before him “Troy in miniature”: a city where the king received him and his 
followers in a court of towers and spacious colonnades. The city was 
Butrint, founded according to legend by Helenus, the son of King Priam, 
after the fall of Troy but dating back to at least the 8th century BC.

Today, Butrint is re-emerging from the obscurity in which it has languished 
for much of the past millennium. But it remains, in the words of John Julius 
Norwich, a British scholar of Byzantium, “the least known, the least 
frequented and the least spoilt” of all the great classical sites of the 
Mediterranean. It owes that mainly to the fact that it sits in southern 
Albania. During the disagreeable regime of Enver Hoxha it had few visitors. 
Since Albania re-opened, Butrint has become the country's largest tourist 
destination. In 1996 it attracted 20,000 visitors. Then law and order 
collapsed in the wake of the country's disastrous pyramid schemes, and the 
visitors vanished. Today tourists are making a tentative return, and the 
figures this year are already close to their 1996 level.

The swell of visitors brings an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is 
to create, on an undeveloped stretch of coast just north of Greece, a new 
tourism industry that can bring prosperity to one of Europe's poorest 
nations. The threat is that local greed, weak planning controls and powerful 
foreign investors will combine to create the common Mediterranean mess of 
badly built hotels, noise and pollution.




Aeneas and Mussolini
The outcome will depend on how well Albanians manage to work with the 
foreign archaeologists, aid agencies and do-gooders who have become 
involved. The main excavation of Butrint started in the 1920s when 
Mussolini, keen to pose as the new founder of Rome, sent an expedition to 
retrace Aeneas's footsteps. During the Hoxha years, little happened. Only in 
the early 1990s did a joint Albanian and British team start work in earnest 
again. They did so under the auspices of the Butrint Foundation, set up in 
1993 by two British grandees: Lord Rothschild, a banker whose villa on the 
shores of Corfu looks across to Butrint, and Lord Sainsbury of Preston 
Candover, a supermarket magnate. The foundation, directed by Sir Patrick 
Fairweather, a former British ambassador to Albania and to Italy, and 
financed mainly by grants from David Packard, heir to America's 
Hewlett-Packard fortune, has been leading the attempt to ensure that 
Butrint's development is adequately financed and sensitively handled. Last 
year, the Albanian government and UNESCO, which has designated Butrint a 
World Heritage site, turned the sparsely inhabited land around it into a 
national park.

Butrint is really several cities, each piled one on top of the last. From 
the late classical period of 300-200 BC dates a beautifully preserved 
theatre, where today's Albanians stage events from beauty contests to folk 
festivals, and a surrounding wall built of immense blocks of stone. From the 
same period, another wall has survived on whose stones are inscriptions 
recording the names of the city's inhabitants.

By the end of that millennium, however, Butrint was in the hands of the 
Romans who smartened up the theatre and installed (predictably) a new bath 
house by the ancient city wall. Along the opposite shores of the lake on 
which the settlement stands, the Roman equivalents of Lords Rothschild and 
Sainsbury built grand villas of their own: one, just starting to be 
excavated, may have belonged to Pomponius Atticus, a chum of Cicero's.

Among the most dramatic of the city's Roman remains is a vast palace, its 
floors covered with elaborate mosaics. Built in the 4th century AD, as the 
Roman empire was crumbling, the palace was squatted in for decades 
afterwards by fishermen who built huts on top of the mosaics.

However, Butrint revived: not just once, but several times. It was a 
Christian settlement in the 6th century, and its massive baptistery, one of 
the largest in the eastern Mediterranean after the baptistery of Hagia Sofia 
in Istanbul, still survives. It was also an outpost of the Venetian empire 
in the 15th century: a Venetian tower dominates the view of the site from a 
distance. And it was seized from the French in 1798 by Ali Pasha, an 
Albanian who entertained such intrepid visitors as Lord Byron and Edward 
Lear and built himself a fine triangular castle nearby.

Today, the site looks like one of those 18th-century etchings of romantic 
ruins. Trees have sprung up around the remains; lush wild flowers poke out 
of the stones; terrapins and water snakes splash about in the remnants of 
the bath house. But it is also being used as a training base by the Butrint 
Foundation, keen to teach young Albanians the pragmatic, hands-on traditions 
of British archaeology. And it is already visited daily by busloads of 
Albanian schoolchildren, who make the seven-hour drive along bumpy roads 
from Tirana, and by tourists, most of them British, who take the ferry from 
Corfu to the little Albanian port of Saranda.

How well Butrint survives tourist pressure will depend on collaboration 
between Richard Hodges, the foundation's scientific director and principal 
fund-raiser, and Auron Tare, head of the newly created national park. The 
foundation has drawn up a management plan, full of good ideas for involving 
local people and protecting the lovely vistas of mountains and sea. It has 
pleased Albanian archaeologists with a plan to dredge the silting channel 
that feeds fresh water into Lake Butrint, a wildlife haven, and it has 
pleased local villagers by persuading a Japanese philanthropist to build a 
new school.

But hungry developers are drooling at the thought of a new Corfu. The 
planners have flirted with various proposals for a casino, half a dozen golf 
courses and a bevy of hotels along the coast. The European Union is 
proposing to finance a road that at present looks alarmingly likely to run 
past the edge of the park. If Butrint and its surrounding region can grow 
prosperous but not polluted, the result could be a showpiece for using 
conservation and culture as engines for development. Even Aeneas might have 
balked at the challenge



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