1st Place to visit when the Pandemic is over
Hidden from the rest of the world until 1990, Albania is back on the map!
Let me start this article with some pictures:
For a small country, Albania is characterised for its biological diversity. There is an abundance of contrasting ecosystems and habitats each with its own unqiue flora and fauna. 3/4 of the country are mountains. We have the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea. There are 4 different lakes, 10 rivers, 3 lagoons, 2 wetlands, 2 roman amphitheatres, 4 ancient greek theatres and hundreds of medieval byzantine castles.
Diversity does not lie only in geography and history but also in religion. On the left you can see a mosque and an orthodox church maybe 30 metres from each other. Also, after WWII Albania was the only country in the world that had more jews than before the start of the war.
However Albanians are inherently atheists (coming from our pagan roots - we used to worship the sun for its heat and the earth for the food) and such thing was enforced also by communism.
What I like to believe is that we welcome all religions because we have more national holidays!
Tourists are welcomed open heartedly because of our famous hospitality. Much more than we do with our fellow Albanians. Maybe because tourism helps our economy a lot and people are grateful for that.
Albanians like me are starting to visit their own country more out of curiosity sparked from such a vivid attention to our homeland. Why you ask?
Because tourists were seen sleeping in houses like this one. They are located in remote rural areas where no regular Albanian from Durrës or Tirana has ever dared going to. They slept, ate and even somehow conversed with the simple owners of the house and had a lovely time. Tourists made us discover that there is more to vacations than going to the beach. We learned Western World’s habits of hiking and climbing up mountains. We started going to the above mentioned lakes, rivers and lagoons and stopped for a second from invading the South of Albania (which is lovely) every summer.
Tourists opened our eyes to the diverse beauties of Albania.
There was a reason why communism prevailed in here. It was believed we had all the resources we needed to survive on our own. And if you take a trip from North to South which takes 6 hours, you will start to believe that as well.
Getting there: Lately, Wizz Air opened a low cost airline with charter flights which made it cheaper to visit Albania. Hotels with 4 stars vary from 50–70 euros per night and food 15–20 euros per person. Perhaps until now the flight ticket was the most expensive thing of the whole trip!
More: Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece and Kosova or even Italy are very close by. An Italo-Balkan tour might make your post-pandemic summer memorable.
