Historic Centres of Berat and Gjirokastër

In Berat, in central Albania, the castle known locally as the Kala has origins in the 4th century BC. The town is believed to be ancient Antipatreia; according to the Roman historian Livy, in 200 BCE the Roman legate Lucius Apustius stormed it, demolished its walls and burned the city. Most of the present castle was built in the 13th century, and the citadel holds many Byzantine churches, mainly of the same century. Churches inside the walls preserve works by the 16th-century painter Onufri.

The Ottoman era began in Berat in 1417 and brought several mosques. Gjirokastra, in the Drinos valley in the south, appears in the record in 1336 as Argyrokastron, 'silver castle', and passed to the Ottomans in 1418. Its stone mansions developed in the 17th century; the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, who visited in 1670, counted about 2,000 houses, eight mosques, three churches and 280 shops.

Under the communist regime both towns were spared modernising building programmes and declared 'museum cities', Berat in June 1961. Gjirokastra was first nominated in 1988, but experts objected to modern buildings in the old town, and it was inscribed only in 2005. Berat was added in 2008. Gjirokastra is the birthplace of the writer Ismail Kadare, who described the town in Chronicle in Stone.