See the streets of the city in 2019 flooded with tourists enjoying its good appearance, a dream come true for the other inhabitants of Gjirokastra, a city in southern Albania identified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO for its architecture of the Ottoman period. global locked up.
Called “the stone city” because of its two-story houses with towers dating back to the 17th century, Gjirokastra and a small Albanian town, Berat, were listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2005 as “rare examples of an architectural character typical of the Ottoman period”.
After the renovation of the city center, Hysen Kodra, one of the inhabitants who remodeled their houses from two hundred to three hundred years ago with wooden facades and stone ceilings in a cabin, after all, the 700 tourist squares in the city center can hardly accommodate the 120,000 visitors of Gjirokastra in the year before the coronavirus pandemic.
“The pandemic cut it abruptly, like with a knife,” says Kodra, whose 13-room guesthouse on top of a hill is empty. “Until 2019, we were so good, with more and more visitors every day, and until 2020, all rooms booked were cancelled. “
The castle of the thirteenth century in the most sensitive of the city and the old radial bazaar of the seventeenth century where tourists walk through the cobblestone streets in search of dishes such as pacha qofte (meatball) or oshaf (dry figs of sheep’s milk), or buy handicrafts, curtains. , carpets, classic folk costumes and others are the main attractions of Gjiroka.
There is also the ethnographic museum in the former home of past communist dictator Enver Hoxha and the newly renovated museum committed to Nobel laureate Ismail Kadare. Tourism in Albania, one of the poorest countries in Europe, generated about 9% of GDP in 2019, and the government expected to increase it to 10% this year.
Kodra’s guest house overlooks Gjirokastra, which has a full-time population of 30,000, where a monument was placed in Hoxha after his death, but kidnapped in 1991 after the fall of communist rule. For a few years after Hoxha’s death in 1985, Kodra’s family circle after a student protest overthrew communist rule in 1990, the family circle regained ownership.
In the absence of another industry in the city, the government has focused on renovating its typical houses and streets to prepare for tourism, tower houses have been transformed into small shops, cafes or restaurants, and the number of visitors quadrupled between 2015 and 2019, most of them from Italy, Poland, France and Spain, and less from the United States , Canada, Australia and Israel.
Since the pandemic of a year ago, this type of activity has returned to the realm of illusions. Manjola Bici, who runs a small shop in the old bazaar that promotes local teas and herbs, said there had been a 60% drop in visitor numbers, and that maximum of those still coming are Albanians who do not spend the night. Despite renewed efforts to advertise the city online, revenue has declined dramatically. Many retail outlets remain closed.
Bici and its neighbors have tried to replace the variety of parts they sell or lower their costs to attract domestic consumers, and have asked the government to reduce corporate taxes, hoping that vaccines will avoid the pandemic and bring tourists back.
“You can see for themselves what tourists are, today’s consumers,” he told reporters, pointing to the empty street.
“I don’t think we’d like this for long if the government didn’t cut all taxes, say, for a year,” Kodra adds. “We don’t know if bookings will arrive from April to May. “But Loena Bakuli in the rate of the tourist projects of the municipality are confident about the future. “The pandemic will disappear one day soon and tourists will see another more beautiful city again,” he said.
(Image Credits: AP)
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