Butrint

The amphitheater at Butrint dates from 3rd C. BC, and held about 2500 people.  This is a Greek theatre, for plays and performances.  The water table has risen to the point where the orchestra is flooded, but it is covered now with a wooden stage and performances are still held here periodically.  Notice the lines chiseled into the amphitheater seats -- lines of demarcation between the "seat" part and the "foot" part of the folks behind you.  Sort of reminded me of occasions (surely very rare) when my father felt the need, because of impending violence, to draw imaginary lines on the back seat of the car that we children were not to transgress.  I have read several descriptions of theaters and coliseums, but none have mentioned the presence of petrified bubble gum and sticky coke residue.

The middle picture is of the baptistry at the Byzantine church built here over Roman baths.  The baptistry has very nice mosaic tile floors, which are covered most of the year by about 30 inches of sand for protection.  The Roman temple walls are largely intact, but a very small portion of the mosaic floor.  As was common, as the city developed parts of old structures were used in the new.  The city eventually had three walls around it; as the city expanded, the outside of the first wall was used as the back of a new line of buildings.

Butrint Lake actually opens up behind Butrint from a small channel connecting it to the Ionian Sea.  The Greek island of Corfu is only about two miles offshore.  The lake has been "planted" with several wooden pylon "tree" farms for use as black mussel nurseries.

The last photo is outside of the "Lion Gate," so named by the Italian archeologist who first did work at Butrint in the 1920s.  Mussolini funded the work evidently to rediscover the glory of Rome, and in the process Luigi Ugolini, the archeologist, apparently destroyed much of the Byzantine over-layer of the city.  Nationalism is such a destructive force!  But the lion of the lentil is eating a wild pig.  The lentil was moved from another place when the original door in the wall was made smaller for extra security.  The original opening was taller, and you can see the curved "crown moulding" at the top.  My photograph makes it look more like a chamfer than a curve, though.

The site itself was like Syri i kaltër, cool and pleasant in some parts.  The views from the top, where there is a museum and a reconstructed 15th C Venetian fortress, are quite good -- Corfu across the Ionian Sea to the west,  the Albanian mountains to the east.

This area around Gjirokastra and Saranda is close to the now-Greek city of Ioannina, and was the central part of the territory controlled in the 1790s-1820s by Ali Pasha Tepelena.  Lord Byron visited his court at Tepelena, if you remember your English lit classes.  I will have to write you a short biography of him -- he was an interesting fellow, until he got a little too ambitious for the Ottomans and they captured him and cut off his head.