Tirana: history and heritage

About Tirana: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Tirana Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Tirana is one of Europe’s younger capitals. It began in the seventeenth century as an Ottoman market town on the plain below Mount Dajti, became Albania’s capital only in 1920, and has reinvented itself several times since. Its heart is Skanderbeg Square, named after the fifteenth-century hero, with the Et’hem Bey Mosque, the Clock Tower and the National History Museum around it.

At a glance

Names through history: Tirana, or Tiranë in Albanian.

Peoples: Albanians, heirs to the ancient peoples of the western Balkans, with Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic and Bektashi traditions.

A market town of 1614, a capital of 1920 and a city that keeps reinventing itself.

Shaped by: the Ottoman Empire (to 1912), the Italian architects of the 1920s and 1930s, the closed decades of 1944–1990, and the open city since.

Geography: a plain below Mount Dajti, between the mountains and the Adriatic.

Tirana today

The Municipality of Tirana counted 598,176 people in the 2023 census, according to Albania’s Institute of Statistics, INSTAT, and Tirana County counted 758,513: roughly a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million residents. The city has grown fast since the 1990s, as families moved from across Albania.

Illyrians and Albanians

Albanians trace their ancestry to the peoples of the ancient western Balkans, and their language is a branch of its own in the Indo-European family. Petrela Castle, on a hill just south of the city, and the Byzantine fortress walls uncovered in central Tirana show that the area was settled long before the town itself.

Founded in 1614

The town is traditionally dated to 1614, when Sulejman Pasha Bargjini built a mosque, a hammam and a bakery here. Tirana grew as a market town of craftsmen and caravans. The Et’hem Bey Mosque, built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is famous for its painted interior of trees, waterfalls and bridges; the Clock Tower beside it dates from the 1820s, and the old stone Tanners’ Bridge still stands near the centre.

Capital in 1920

Albania declared independence in 1912, in Vlorë. In 1920 the Congress of Lushnjë chose Tirana as the capital, partly because it was central and well connected. Albania’s national hero, Skanderbeg, who held off the Ottomans in the fifteenth century from his castle at Krujë, half an hour north, gives his name to the main square.

The Italian boulevard

In the 1920s and 1930s Italian architects, among them Florestano Di Fausto and Armando Brasini, laid out the grand axis of the city: the ministries around Skanderbeg Square and the long boulevard running south to the university. Their ochre buildings still frame the centre.

The closed decades and after

From 1944 to 1990 Albania was one of the most isolated countries in Europe, and its hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers are a reminder of those years; two in Tirana have become the Bunk’Art museums, and the House of Leaves tells the story of state surveillance. After 1990 Tirana opened up, and in the 2000s it painted its grey blocks in bold colours and stripes, the start of the bright, creative city you see today.

Many faiths, one city

Tirana is known for the ease with which its faiths live together. Sunni Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic Christians and Bektashis share the city, and the World Headquarters of the Bektashi order is here. The new Great Mosque, St Paul’s Catholic Cathedral and the Orthodox Cathedral of the Resurrection stand within walking distance of one another.

Arts and institutions

The mosaic over the entrance of the National History Museum, The Albanians, greets you on Skanderbeg Square, and the National Gallery of Arts, the Opera and Ballet Theatre in the Palace of Culture and the University of Tirana are all nearby. Albanian iso-polyphony, the ancient folk singing of the south, was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2005 and is now on its Representative List.

Our advice: start on Skanderbeg Square, step inside the Et’hem Bey Mosque to see its paintings, climb the Clock Tower, then walk the boulevard to the Pyramid and on to the colourful Blloku district for coffee. On a clear day, take the Dajti Ekspres cable car for the view over the whole plain.

Sources

Population: Institute of Statistics of Albania (INSTAT), Population and Housing Census 2023. History: Municipality of Tirana; National History Museum of Albania; Albanian National Agency of Tourism; UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Tirana: history and heritage before you go.