Berat Castle

Berat Castle is one of the most extraordinary living monuments in Europe — a Byzantine citadel on a steep rocky hill whose walls enclose not ruins but an inhabited neighbourhood of stone houses, Byzantine churches, and cobblestone lanes where local families still live. The castle hill dominates Berat, the UNESCO-listed 'City of a Thousand Windows' — named for the distinctive rows of large windows on the white Ottoman houses that cascade down the slopes below. Within the castle walls stand over 20 Byzantine churches, several converted to mosques and back again across the centuries; the finest houses the Onufri Museum, dedicated to the 16th-century Albanian iconographer Onufri, whose vivid use of red pigment revolutionised Byzantine painting. The castle dates from the 4th century BC in its origins and was expanded under Byzantine, Bulgarian, Angevin, and Ottoman rule.