01
Stop one
Gjirokaster Castle
Yonex Vcore 100D 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: A fortress lying along the ridge above the Drino valley like a sleeping animal, and one of the largest in the Balkans. Something stood here by the twelfth century, but the extent you walk is largely Ali Pasha of Tepelena's, rebuilt around 1812 together with an aqueduct that supplied it. Then the harder truth: the Zog regime and later the communist state used it as a prison. Its galleries now display captured artillery from several wars, and on a terrace sits the wreck of a United States Air Force training aircraft that landed at Tirana in 1957, presented under the communist government as a captured spy plane. Every five years the National Folklore Festival fills it with singing. The stone holds both.
02
Stop two
Ottoman tower houses of Gjirokaster
Yonex Vcore 100D 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: They call it the city of stone, and from above the roofs are slabs of grey schist laid like the scales of something asleep on the hillside. Sorry. The houses. The kule, tower houses, built mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by prosperous Ottoman-era families, and their shape is a confession: near-windowless stone strongrooms at the bottom, living quarters above, then one bright reception room at the top. Fear downstairs, hospitality upstairs, in a period of clan feuding and insecurity. Around six hundred survive, and the Skenduli and Zekate houses are open to visitors. Declared a museum city in 1961 and inscribed by UNESCO in 2005 with Berat, as a rare surviving Ottoman provincial town.
03
Stop three
Zekate House
Yonex Vcore 100D 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Climb, and keep climbing, because this house saves everything for the top. It was built in 1811 for Beqir Zeko, an official in the administration of Ali Pasha of Tepelena, and it is the grandest of Gjirokaster's tower houses, rising floor by floor to a reception room with carved wooden ceilings, painted floral and architectural decoration, built-in cupboards and divans arranged for guests in the Ottoman manner. Below it: stores, and a cistern. A house that keeps its water at the bottom and its beauty at the top is a lesson about people, and I shall stop there. Nationalised under the communist regime, returned after 1991 to descendants of the family, who maintain it and open it. The whole town lies beneath.
04
Stop four
Ethnographic Museum and Enver Hoxha's birthplace
Yonex Vcore 100D 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: A house rebuilt in 1966 on the site of one that burned in 1916, standing where Enver Hoxha was born in 1908, and for years a museum devoted to the man who ruled Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985. Then the regime fell and the building was given different work: it is the Ethnographic Museum now, floors of furnishings, textiles, costumes, tools and household objects, arranged as a typical wealthy Gjirokaster household. A room emptied of one life and filled with a thousand ordinary ones. That is the nearest thing to hope I have found all day. The writer Ismail Kadare was born in this town as well, and his childhood home nearby is likewise restored as a museum.
I calculate what a roof can carry before it stops being a roof. Kilograms per square metre, wet snow versus dry, the pitch, the span. So I approve of a dense string pattern on principle. One hundred square inches of head, 305 grams unstrung, a 16×20 bed, 27 inches long. Four extra crosses, which is what the D stands for, and four extra crosses is a tighter grid carrying a heavier load.
A tighter grid gives less and tells you more. The ball sits down, the launch angle drops, and you get a frame that holds its line everywhere from a flat drive to a low slice that has to stay under the net cord. It is also perfect for a cold winter court in Gjirokastër, where the ball goes heavy and dead and a loose bed simply gives up on it.
Gjirokastër is a structural engineer's holiday. Stone slab roofs laid overlapping without nails, because snow here is serious and tiles would fail — except that stone roofs are enormously heavy and fail catastrophically, all at once, under a big fall. The town's finest feature is also its largest hazard.
Gjirokastër has been living with that trade-off since 1811 and it is precisely the trade-off a dense pattern makes.
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