An Adriatic Journey: from Trieste to Corfu

26 May - 15 June 2012

Tour Highlights

This tour, led by Christopher Wood, Prof. Frank Sear and Rudence Ruka (in Albania), includes visits to ten UNESCO World Heritage List sites: Croatia Split and the Palace of Diocletian (1979), old city of Dubrovnik (1979, 1998), episcopal complex of the Euphrasian Basilica, Porec (1997), Trogir (1997), Cathedral of St. James in Šibenik (2000); Montenegro Kotor (1979); Albania Berat (2008), Gjirokastra (2005), Butrint (1992); Greece Old Corfu Town (2007).

• Other highlights include: 
• • Spectacular scenery from the magnificent panoramic coastline of Croatia and Albania to sea views that ‘launched a thousand travel posters’ in Corfu
• • Well-preserved archaeological sites, such as Diocletian's vast palace at Split and the Roman Military stronghold of Narona in Croatia, and Epidamnos/Dyrrachium (Durrës), Apollonia, and Butrint in Albania
• • Visits to two notable Hapsburg palaces—Miramare Palace in Trieste, built by Maximillian, who became the Emperor of Mexico and was executed in 1867, and the neo-classical Achilleion Palace built on Corfu as a summer retreat for Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was assassinated in 1898
• • Magnificent Byzantine churches and monasteries, including the Euphrasian Basilica in Pore?, Croatia and the Monastery and Basilica of Paleokastritsa, Corfu
• • The Albanian towns of Gjirokastra and Berat, two of the best preserved Ottoman towns in the Balkans
• • The extraordinary landscape of mushroom-shaped concrete bunkers in Albania, a legacy of Albania’s former communist dictator Enver Hoxha
• • Two days on Corfu, one of Greece's loveliest islands, known to many from the much-loved writings of the Durrell brothers - Lawrence and Gerald.
• • Guest lectures from a number of specialists, including Richard Pine, Academic Director of the Durrell School in Corfu, on the Durrells

Overnight ITALY Trieste (2 nights) CROATIA Rovinj (2 nights) • Zadar (2 nights) • Split (2 nights) • Dubrovnik (2 nights) MONTENEGRO Kotor (1 nights) ALBANIA Tirana (2 nights) • Berat (2 nights) • Saranda (2 nights) CORFU Corfu Town (3 nights).

Visits include ITALY Trieste (Colle di San Giusto, Basilica di San Giusto, Borgo Teresiano, Castello Miramare) CROATIA Porec •  Pula • Opatja • Sibenik Cathedral • Zadar • the UNESCO heritage town, Trogir • the rich archaeological areas of Split, Salona & Narona archaeological sites • Dubrovnik (city walls, Franciscan &?Dominican monasteries, Renaissance Rector’s Palace) MONTENEGRO old town of Kotor ALBANIA Rozafa Fortress, Shkodra Tirana • Kruja • Durrës • Apollonia • Berat • Albanian Riviera • Mesopontum • Blue Eye • Girokaster • Butrint CORFU Corfu Old Town • Achilleion Palace • Paleokastritsa • Mon Repos Palace • Monastery of Vlakherna and Pondikonisi.

About the Tour

The long, narrow Adriatic Sea has been both a bridge and a barrier between the Italian and Balkan peninsulas for millennia. Across its waters numerous civilizations and three great belief systems - Latin and Orthodox Christianity, and Islam - have both interacted and vied for supremacy. Our journey explores how the Adriatic was used as a trade corridor from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe and as a frontier between Europe and the Balkans. It begins in the seaport of Trieste in northeast Italy, and then traverses the stunning coast of the eastern Adriatic, through Croatia, Montenegro and Albania, before crossing the Ionian Sea to the beautiful Greek island of Corfu. Amidst the vibrant, cosmopolitan communities that inhabit this coastline today, you will encounter legacies of the many cultures—Illyrian, Greek, Roman, Venetian, Slav, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman—that once traded and settled along these shores.

Geography has shaped the history of the Adriatic. Much of its coastline is hemmed in by the high mountains of the Italian Apennine Range to the west and the Balkan Dinaric Alps to the east. Its east coast is also protected by a large number of picturesque coastal islands. Possession of its ports and islands has therefore determined much of its destiny as successive empires competed to control them and the lucrative trade routes that passed through them. Romans, Venetians and Hapsburgs, for example, all prospered from controlling Trieste. Spectacularly located at the north-eastern end of the Adriatic Sea and close to the centre of Europe, Trieste provided merchants a port that allowed their goods to travel to the heart of Europe via the Alpine trade routes or to the Mediterranean via its sea trade routes.

Other powers also contributed to Adriatic affairs. In Croatia there are legacies from different Hungarian regimes that were a constant and significant presence after the Magyars expanded their kingdom in Pannonia (Danube Basin) to the Adriatic coast in the mid-thirteenth century. The Hungarians and Venetians contested control of Zadar, for example, until Ladislaus of Hungary sold the city to Venice (1409). Control of the island town of Trogir was similarly contested until the kings of Hungary guaranteed Trogir independence in return for an alliance.

After their entry into the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries, the southern Slav peoples also founded states in the region: Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro. The Albanians, further south, are the descendents of some of the regions' earliest inhabitants, the Illyrians: an Indo-European people that brought the mounted warfare and iron weapons of Inner Asia to the region. The Illyrian tribes (Istrians, Liburnians, Dalmatians, Japods) entered Pannonia around 1200 BC and eventually settled in the northern region of modern Croatia, which is named after them. The Dalmatians settled further south in the region now called Dalmatia. These peoples traded amber with the Mediterranean and Northern Europeans, and also engaged in piracy.

The Illyrians' long history of interaction with the Romans began in the third century BC, when the Romans invaded coastal towns in an attempt to stop Illyrian attacks on Roman shipping. Eventually, what is now Croatia became an important part of the Roman Empire; the marvellous Roman monuments of Pula reflect this. Moreover, this region ultimately gave the Empire no less than six emperors. The emperor who left the greatest personal mark upon the region was Diocletian, who became emperor in 284 AD and abdicated in 303 AD. During his long life, Diocletian reunited and reinvigorated the Roman Empire after the disastrous invasions and civil wars of the third century. He retired to a massive palace he built at what is now called Split - a palace so large that, after his death, it was slowly transformed into a sizeable town.

In the Middle Ages, the East Roman Empire, now Byzantium, competed against the Venetians for economic control of the eastern Adriatic Sea. By the late Middle Ages the newly emerging power of the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered most of the Balkan Peninsula by 1481, entered the fray. There were also some lesser contenders for Adriatic power. From the late Middle Ages, the small, semi-independent trading city the Italians called Ragusa (Dubrovnik) survived by walking a tightrope between jealous Venice, who exerted her might over much of the Adriatic Sea, and the Imperial power of the Ottomans. Threatened by land and sea and paying lip-service to these greater powers, Ragusa nevertheless prospered as an entrepôt, uniting Balkan land trade with Mediterranean maritime exchange.

The tiny Republic of Montenegro, declared an independent nation in May 2006, was inhabited principally by the Illyrians until the Slavs arrived in the 6th century. Around the 10th century, Venice started to take control of southern Dalmatia, and from 1420 to 1797 the Venetians dominated the coast of today's Montenegro around the important maritime centre of Kotor.

In Albania, we make a short visit to Shkodra, once the capital of the Illyrian state of the Ardiaeans before travelling to Tirana, Albania’s capital since 1920. Here Albania’s present and future play centre stage in a city that has been transformed in recent years by the application of brightly–coloured paint to formerly drab soviet-style apartment blocks. The forging of Albania’s new identity and its future, however, is closely entwined in establishing who Albanians were and how they present their past. Confirming their connection to the ancient Illyrians is central to the identity of many Albanians, as is the veneration paid to the country’s national hero Skanderbeg, a 15th century leader who resisted the Ottomans for 25 years from his mountain fortress in Kruje. Albania’s classical heritage will be viewed at sites such as the ancient Greco-Roman port-city of Durrës, starting point for the Via Egnatia – the Roman road leading to Constantinople; Apollonia, founded in 588 BC by the Corinthians, and Butrint, described by Virgil as Troy in miniature. Inland in the mountains the towns of Gjirokastra and Berat have rich legacies from Byzantine and Ottoman rule. Minarets jostle with church towers, testifying to the faiths each introduced.

Our journey also takes in the beautiful coastline known as the Albanian Riviera. Described as the ‘Mediterranean as it once was’, this shoreline has so far escaped large-scale tourist development, but improved access via a recently completed new road will no doubt soon change that. For the moment, however, its pristine beauty is much as it was when earlier travellers waxed lyric about its charms. English artist Edward Lear, who portrayed this scenery in his paintings during his visit in 1848, wrote ‘no lines of mountain more beautiful—none more teeming with romance and interest—can be gazed on by the traveller, be he painter or poet’. Some decades earlier, the poet Lord Byron immortalised Albania’s landscape in his famous poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.  From Saranda in southern Albania we take a short ferry ride across the Ionian Sea to complete our journey at one of Greece’s loveliest islands, Corfu. Once eulogized by Lord Byron as the ‘Shores of glory’, Corfu bears the marks of Romans, Normans, Venetians, French, Turks, Germans and the British.

Lecture Program in Corfu

In Corfu site visits will be conducted be local guides and we have also arranged for an evening lecture and orientation walk of the old town of Corfu by Richard Pine, author of Lawrence Durrell: the Mindscape, and founder of the Durrell School of Corfu.