The French newspaper “Le Figaro” has penned an article about Albania, highlighting its stunning mountains that occupy 70% of he country’s territory.
Full article below:
The Dinaric Alps, unlike the Franco-Italian-Swiss Alps, extend between Slovenia and northern Albania, with their highest point, Jezerca Peak, reaching 2,692 meters in our country. These trails offer access to breathtaking landscapes that remained isolated for decades, until the fall of the communist regime in 1991. As you hike, glacial valleys yield to towering peaks, characterized by rugged cliffs and stunning summits.
The national parks of Valbona and Theth are connected by a higher hike, which has become an El Dorado for travelers from all over the world: we meet travelers of all levels, from Europe, but also from India and the United States. The path snakes between beech trees and fir trees, a variety of flora from Eastern Europe, up to the Valbona Pass, at an altitude of 1,860 meters. Here and there, sheep graze freely on the feet of giant limestone slabs standing vertically. In Theth, the most preserved alpine village in the region, guesthouses dot the lush fields. You must go there quickly before the village is transformed by tourism! From this rural town, other hiking trails lead to the Blue Eye, a pool of pristine water.
Some roads allow you to play on the border ridges. They lead to Kosovo or Montenegro, for example through the Peja Pass (1,707 meters). Then the trail passes along the cobalt blue lakes dominated by the peaks of the Bjeshkët e Namuna. Another page of history has left its mark on the landscape: bunkers with rounded roofs, remnants of the 35 years of Enver Hoxha’s paranoid dictatorship, who died in 1985. Numbering 170,000, these concrete mushrooms are now abandoned.
The fortified houses take us back to the time of the Kanun, the ancestral code of honor at the heart of Ismail Kadare’s Broken April, the great Albanian novelist’s work. These reconciliation towers sheltered those threatened by family vengeance, even distant relatives. In Theth, in front of the church, Kolë Pjetër Pisha recounts in an indelible way how he had waited for a bullet in his leg.
“It was revenge, the nephew of a victim of a robbery I had committed,” recounts the old man wearing the traditional Albanian cap, qeleshe, with a white scarf. He didn’t hold it against his attacker: in the 1940s, his own grandfather had killed a man who had forcefully wooed his sister… Today, he plays the çifteli, a small lute with two strings, for tourists who bring some life to the village.
Time seems to have stopped in these mountains: farmers transport sleds with carts pulled by horses, conical haystacks line up in old stone buildings, women wearing colorful scarves walk among the fir trees. These images evoke Tintin and King Ottokar’s Scepter, a comic for which Hergé is said to have been inspired by this region. The double-headed black eagle on a red background of the Albanian flag, whose name literally means “the land of eagles,” masters of the sky of these Dinaric Alps.