Kanina Fortress

Kaninë Castle lies about six kilometres from Vlorë, on the flank of the Shushicë mountain some 380 metres above the sea, on the site of an ancient settlement reckoned one of the oldest in the Vlorë region. Its enclosing wall runs about a kilometre and takes in some three and a half hectares. The fortification itself is thought to go back to the 4th century BC, though it is also dated a century later.

In the 4th century AD the castle was turned into a fortified town. In the 6th century it was rebuilt by Justinian I, who built or rebuilt ninety-four fortifications in Epirus, and Procopius of Caesarea names it in his list as Kionin.

In the 12th and 13th centuries Kaninë became a military centre of the first rank, serving the medieval Angevin kingdom in Albania. Under Hohenstaufen rule it was the main fortification in the country, and the seat of the Province of Kaninë, governed by Jacob Blasiniani. In the 14th century the castle was the centre of the Principality of Valona.

Sultan Suleiman had the castle repaired in 1530. During the Morean War in 1690 the fortress and nearby Vlorë fell under Venetian control, in a Venetian attempt to aid the uprising of the local Greek minority. Later that same year the Ottomans besieged the town, which fell on 17 September.

Cross-walls divided the castle into three parts. Of these only the wall closing off the highest ground survives, defended by three towers. Four gates pierced the circuit, one of them joining the citadel to the rest of the fortification; the best preserved is on the southern side, guarded by a heavy hexagonal tower, its opening 3.40 metres high and 2.85 metres wide under a sectorial arch, its double leaves barred from within. The gates of Kaninë have none of the vaulted internal galleries or outer barbicans found in other medieval castles such as Shkodër, Krujë and Berat: the entrances are plain and covered by flanking towers. The Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi recorded dwellings inside the walls, buildings for the garrison, munition stores and cisterns for the water supply.

The towers that strengthen the walls are round, polygonal, triangular and four-sided, and many of them, judged by masonry technique and plan form, belong to different building periods. The triangular ones are the earliest, small enough to serve also as buttresses in the manner of those at Berat and Butrint; two of the seven towers standing today are of that type, and a plan of the castle published in 1688 shows fourteen towers in all. Brick and roof-tile fragments were set through the joints of the triangular and semicircular towers, the latter resembling the towers of the Butrint acropolis. The polygonal towers belong to a later phase and carry gunports, and in plan and technique they resemble those of the lower castle at Durrës, built in the 13th century.

The last repairs were made by the Albanian feudal lords of Vlorë over the 17th to 19th centuries. The site was entered on Albania's register of cultural monuments in the archaeology class on 1 October 1948, under number 95, and remains a Cultural Monument of Albania.