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May/June 2025 Issue

Tohan Aerial Photographic Service/AFLO

Features From the Issue

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  • Features

    A Passion for Fruit

    Exploring the surprisingly rich archaeological record of berries, melons…and more

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    © BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

  • Features

    Lost City of the Samurai

    Archaeologists rediscover Ichijodani, a formidable stronghold that flourished amid medieval Japan’s brutal power struggles

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    Tohan Aerial Photographic Service/AFLO

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    Goddess at the Crossroads

    Why a city put its trust in a Greek deity feared throughout the Mediterranean world

    Istanbul Archaeology Museums

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    Desert Paradise Found

    How a tiny, water-rich kingdom came to dominate vital trade routes in the Arabian Gulf 4,000 years ago

    Courtesy BACA/Moesgaard Museum

  • Features

    Peru’s Timeless Threads

    More than 1,000 years ago, master weavers kept the ancient traditions of the Moche culture alive

    Jeffrey Quilter

Digs & Discoveries

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Letter From Albania

Letter From Albania

The Many Fortresses of Ali Pasha

How a father and son are documenting the architectural legacy of a renegade nineteenth-century warlord

Andronira Burda
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Artifact

Artifacts

Etruscan Carved Gemstone

© The Trustees of the British Museum
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Off the Grid

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Off the Grid May/June 2025

Bulow Plantation Ruins, Florida

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Sugar mill, Bulow Plantation Ruins Historic State Park
Ben O’Donnell

Around the World

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  • IVORY COAST

  • ITALY

    Lump of Egyptian blue pigment unearthed at Domus Aurea, Rome

  • MEXICO

    Zapotec site of Guiengola in southern Oaxaca
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Slideshow: An Ottoman Ruler Reimagines his Realm

From 1788 to 1822, Ali Pasha of Tepelena ruled large swaths of what is now Greece and Albania as the regional governor of the Ottoman Empire. His reign was marked by his prowess on the battlefield and his love of luxury, but also for the enormous building campaign he initiated across his lands. This included restoring or building dozens of castles, schools, mosques, palaces, and aqueducts, to name just a few of his projects. After his death, Ali Pasha loomed in the Albanian imagination more as an insatiable conqueror than as a relentless builder, in part because many of his finest works were erased or degraded over the centuries. What’s left has given archaeologists enough to begin reconstructing the pasha’s achievements.

The “Bridge” of Ali Pasha in Gjirokastra, a 130-foot span across a scrubby vale blooming with yellow Jerusalem sage, is actually a tiny portion of a colossal multilevel aqueduct stretching nearly eight miles from a freshwater source to Gjirokastra Castle. Built after Ali’s 1811 conquest of the city of Gjirokastra, the aqueduct was one of the pasha’s most ambitious civil engineering projects. Independent Albania’s first and only king, Zog I, dismantled the aqueduct for material to build a prison in the 1930s, and the After taking Gjirokastra in 1811, Ali Pasha dramatically upgraded its castle with 100-foot-tall walls and bastions. The enormous citadel also contained a neighborhood of homes, shops, bathhouses, and places of worship. Ali erected a stylish Italianate clock tower, in part to remind people of Muslim prayer times. The pasha was not known to often answer the call to prayer himself; he once told American journalists that a mosque would get more use if it were a theater.
After taking Gjirokastra in 1811, Ali Pasha dramatically upgraded its castle with 100-foot-tall walls and bastions. The enormous citadel also contained a neighborhood of homes, shops, bathhouses, and places of worship. Ali erected a stylish Italianate clock tower, in part to remind people of Muslim prayer times. The pasha was not known to often answer the call to prayer himself; he once told American journalists that a mosque would get more use if it were a theater.
A few of Gjirokastra’s fortified villas still have their original interiors, which display the luxurious tastes of the ruling class during the pashalic era. The Zekate House was built in 1812 for one of Ali Pasha’s administrators. None of Ali’s own seraglios survive, but this house’s ceremonial room shows what the governor’s palace chambers may have looked like, although they would have been much larger. Visitors to Ali Pasha’s court would have been impressed by its ornate frescoed plaster hearths, plush carpets and divans, and imported plate-glass windows.
Rising 500 feet above Gjirokastra and the Drino Valley, Gjirokastra Castle was a small fort in antiquity that gradually grew in prominence. Archaeological excavations of the castle in the 1970s and 1980s uncovered fragments of ancient roof tiles, ceramic storage vessels, drinking cups, and amphoras. Ali Pasha’s reimagination of the ship-shaped fortress in the 1810s added the clock tower and mighty bastions.
After Ali Pasha revamped Gjirokastra Castle in the 1810s, he made it a showcase of his wide-reaching influence and military power. He acquired these cannons in a deal with the British.
Porto Palermo Castle, on Albania’s Ionian coast, is one of the country’s best examples of a classic French-inflected Ali Pasha design. Like many of Ali’s constructions, it was intended to send a message. “It’s all about optics,” says historian Emily Neumeier of Temple University. “It’s all about creating the stage set of power.”
A hexagonal domed chamber at the heart of Porto Palermo Castle provides surprisingly good acoustics and is sometimes used as an intimate concert space today. Ali Pasha built the castle sometime between 1804 and 1814. The signage in red dates to its use as a prison in a restricted military zone during Albania’s Communist dictatorship. Even the country’s leading archaeologists and historians were unable to visit the site until the late 1980s.
Ali Pasha ordered the building or renovation of at least 40 Orthodox churches; no other Muslim Ottoman governor is known to have commissioned even one. The Church of St. Kosmas the Aetolian, in remote south-central Albania, was a personal project: Ali may have befriended the future saint during his lifetime. According to the story, the peripatetic preacher Kosmas met a young Ali and prophesied that he’d become a great conqueror—but that his neck would be red when he arrived in Istanbul. (He did, and it was, following his beheading by the sultan’s forces.) The Pasha of Berati, a rival to Ali, executed Kosmas near this church. Ali vanquished Berati in 1809. Five years later, he erected the church in territory that now belonged to him.
Those seeking an audience with Ali Pasha at Tepelena Castle would have to be admitted through the monumental south gate, set roughly perpendicular to the south wall for defensive purposes. To keep up with rapid advances in artillery technology in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Ali’s larger, later castles also had distinctive sloped walls and polygonal towers to repel or absorb cannon fire at angles rather than take direct blows. Like most of Ali Pasha’s castles, however, the one at Tepelena was never attacked.
Libohova Castle, seven miles southeast of Gjirokastra on the opposite side of the Drino Valley, once appeared to intimidate, but its walls are slender compared to other Ali Pasha fortresses. Archaeologists have concluded it was primarily residential: A palace for Ali’s sister, Shanisha, once stood within the ramparts.
Ali Pasha’s sister, Shanisha, for whom he built Libohova Castle, was accused of even more extravagant cruelty than Ali himself by writers such as Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers. Ali’s mother, Esmihan Hanëmi, came in for the same treatment. Whatever the truth, Ali Pasha apparently appreciated the strong women in his life.
Archaeologists Luan and Ardit Përzhita assembled this 3D model of Libohova Castle from thousands of high-resolution photos taken with a drone-mounted camera. An Ali Pasha original with little modification in the two centuries since his death, the castle may prove a fruitful site for excavation. Future surveys and thermal imaging will help archaeologists determine where the stone foundations within its walls lie.

Slideshow: Honoring a Divine Protector

The goddess Hecate, a deity of magic and transitions, was associated with the frightening aspects of life throughout the Mediterranean world. In western Anatolia’s city of Stratonicea, however, she took on a very different role as patron goddess and protector. The city’s residents worshipped Hecate at a sanctuary in the neighboring town of Lagina, which contains the only known temple dedicated solely to her.

North gate, Stratonicea, Turkey
Stratonicea’s arched northern gate was the nexus of the sacred way that connected the city with Lagina.
Byzantine church and Roman baths, Stratonicea, Turkey
The ruins of Stratonicea include a Byzantine church (foreground) and Roman baths (background).
Theater, Stratonicea, Turkey
Restoration work continues on Stratonicea’s massive theater, which was built into a hill at the city’s southern end and likely seated some 10,000 spectators.
Aerial photo of sanctuary of Hecate, Lagina, Turkey
An aerial photograph of the sanctuary devoted to Hecate at Lagina shows the altar (left) and temple (center), both of which the Stratoniceans rebuilt in marble in the second century B.C.
Temple ruins, Lagina, Turkey
Architectural fragments frame the ruins of the temple at Lagina.
Decorated section of coffered ceiling, Lagina, Turkey
A decorated section of coffered ceiling once adorned the temple at Lagina.