Project

Archaeological evidence indicates that Corfiot traders founded Butrint in the eighth century B.C. Situated along the Adriatic coast, the town functioned as a way station between Epirus and the Italian territories to the south. The Greek historian Thucydides, writing in the fifth century B.C., refers to a struggle for control of the narrow straits that separate Butrint from the island of Corfu. (...)

Archaeological evidence indicates that Corfiot traders founded Butrint in the eighth century B.C. Situated along the Adriatic coast, the town functioned as a way station between Epirus and the Italian territories to the south. The Greek historian Thucydides, writing in the fifth century B.C., refers to a struggle for control of the narrow straits that separate Butrint from the island of Corfu. In Book III of Virgil's Aeneid, the displaced hero arrives at the site and remarks: “I saw before me Troy in miniature / A slender copy of our massive tower.” Butrint was colonized by the Romans under Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., and later occupied by the Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman Empires. These layers of civilization were rediscovered by Italian archaeologist Luigi Ugolini in the 1920's, who unearthed an amphitheater dating from the fourth century B.C. Subsequent excavations have yielded Roman villas with intact mosaic floors, shrines, a baptistery, and a Byzantine palace. Communist dictator Enver Hoxha (1945-1985) closed Albania to foreign excavation and research, which resumed after the fall of his government in 1991.