Elbasan Castle Day Trip: Roman Walls, Bazaar and Ballokume

Elbasan is an hour from the coast on a good road, and almost nobody stops. That is the whole point of this trip. The city wears its history awkwardly — a Roman fortress with apartment blocks growing out of it, an Ottoman quarter half-restored, a clock tower rebuilt more times than anyone can agree on — and it is far more interesting for it.

We walk in through a gap in a fifteen-hundred-year-old wall and find laundry lines, a barber and a primary school. People have lived inside these walls continuously since Justinian's engineers raised them in the sixth century, and they have never stopped.

What makes this different

This is a walking day, not a coach day. Total driving is under three hours return; everything else is on foot inside a compact old town, with a long lunch in the middle of it. Groups are capped at fourteen so we can get into the smaller courtyards without filling them.

We finish at the bakeries on Rruga Qemal Stafa for ballokume — dense corn-flour biscuits beaten over a wood fire, traditionally made only for Summer Day on 14 March, though the bakeries near the castle gate gave up on that rule long ago.