It is always now!: Last minute trip to Krujë

Durrës was neither very interesting nor a nice place to chill. It was one day left until the ferry went to Italy and the beautiful lady at the hotel reception proposed to visit Krujë.

There are many buses from Durrës that stop in Fushë-Krujë. From there to Krujë one can take a commuter bus. The road to Krujë is quite steep and the bus had general problems to climb up the road. Eventually the gear box suddenly broke. Fortunately Albanians are very kind - every car driver who passed our bus took some of the bus passengers. So within 5 minutes everybody found a car. (I cannot imagine that this would be possible in Germany. Here nobody would stop and help.)

Waiting for cars to be carried to Krujë.

The town of Krujë was built around the castle during the last decades. It was formerly only a small village below the castle while most of the people lived inside the castle. Therefore the town itself is not very pretty. It is nevertheless the only place where I have been where they try to build up a tourism industry. As this is still in the beginning they are still experimenting with service and prices. For example I wanted to buy a scoop of ice cream. All over the country a scoop costs maximal 50 cents but they wanted to have 3,50 €. The lady in the coffeehouse was surprised to hear that this price is higher than e.g. in Munich. She thought that tourists must be very rich but already noticed that only a few tourists came to her coffeehouse.

The castle.

At the entrance of the castle they
rebuilt some of the former market houses.

The town of Krujë.

Before continuing it is time for music: Purple Penguin - Mountain

The Krujë castle played an important role in Albanian history. For example the national hero Skanderbeg used it as headquarter during his fight against the Ottomans. In honor to Skanderbeg a museum was built in the communist era:

The building of the Skanderbeg museum.

In the southern part of the castle area are some older houses and further museums. One can for example visit the Teqe of Dollme. Only a türbe and a hamam were preserved from the old teqe. In the türbe are three graves of Bektaschi priests. Two of them are raised because these priests did a hajj while the third one did not. In 1967 religion was forbidden in Albania and so the teqe was closed and the paintings in the türbe were painted over.