Elbasan and the Forgotten Roads of the Heartland

Elbasan isn’t loud. It doesn’t shout for your attention. It waits. Like a poem tucked in a drawer.

We entered the city through its old castle gates, where modern life rubs shoulders with history. The smell of burek wafted from bakeries. Children played among Ottoman walls. The city square hummed with quiet contentment.

Cycling out toward Labinot, the landscape softened. Olive groves, old bridges, songs from fields. We stopped for figs and homemade jam at a roadside stand where the owner told us, “These trees remember more than people do.”

It may not be famous. But it’s real.