Rozafa Fortress

The rocky hill above Shkodër, rising 130 metres over the meeting of the Buna and Drin rivers, has been settled since the Early Bronze Age. Its earliest fortification walls date to the 4th–3rd century BCE, when it formed the citadel of the Illyrian city of Skodra, capital under the Labeatae — Livy called it the strongest place of the Labeatae — though the walls a visitor sees today are mostly Venetian work.

In the Third Illyrian War King Gentius concentrated his forces at Scodra. Attacked by the Roman army under Lucius Anicius Gallus, he fled into the city and waited, trapped, for a relieving army under his brother Caravantius that never came. On the third day of a truce he surrendered, was taken into custody and sent to Rome; the Romans then marched north of Scutari Lake and at Meteon captured his queen Etuta, Caravantius, and his sons Scerdilaidas and Pleuratus. Livy records the triumph granted to Anicius in Rome: "In a few days, both on land and sea did he defeat the brave Illyrian tribe, who had relied on their knowledge of their own territory and fortifications." The Illyrian kingdom fell in 168 BC. Centuries later Procopius listed Skydreonopolis among the fortresses rebuilt in the age of Justinian.

The chronicles record the castle taken from the Balša family by the Ottomans in 1392, returned to the Balšas as a gift, and then ceded by them to the Republic of Venice, which set about strengthening it: a barbican went up from 1407, and the fortified entrance complex — a system of sharp-angled outer walls fronting a gate tower ten metres wide and twenty long — was finished in 1468. Within the walls stood a 13th-century Venetian Catholic church, considered by scholars to be St Stephen's Cathedral.

The fortress has been the site of several famous sieges, among them the siege of Shkodër of 1478–79, when the Ottoman Empire captured the city. After the conquest the cathedral was transformed into the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Mosque.

The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi described a complete but small fortress of dressed stone with no moat: towers and battlements, two gates, a single mosque of Sultan Mehmed, seven or eight cisterns filled with rainwater, storehouses of grain and munitions, around a hundred soldiers' dwellings, many cannon — and underground passages down to the lake, known only to the men of the castle, for drawing water in time of siege.

Twice the castle stood against its own masters. In 1787 an Ottoman army besieged Kara Mahmud Pasha of the Bushati family here, and he emerged the victor; in 1830 the last vizier of Shkodër, Mustafa Pasha, was besieged in his turn and finally surrendered for want of bread and munitions. The vali kept his seat in the castle until 1858, and it remained an administrative centre until 1865, after which only the regular garrison stayed on. The fortress endured one more great investment, the siege of Shkodër of 1912–13.

The fortress carries one of the Balkans' great immurement legends, attested as early as 1505 in De obsidione Scodrensi by the Albanian humanist Marin Barleti. Three brothers set out to build a castle, but each night the foundations fell. A wise old man told them the walls would stand only if the wife who brought the workers' food the next day were buried alive within them, and swore them to silence on their besa. The two elder brothers quietly warned their wives; the youngest kept his oath. It was Rozafa, his wife, who carried the basket. She accepted her fate with one request — that holes be left for her right eye, right hand, right foot and right breast, so she could still cheer, comfort, rock and suckle her infant son.

A well-known Serbian version, the epic The Building of Skadar published by Vuk Karadžić in 1815, makes the brothers members of the noble Mrnjavčević family: Vukašin, Uglješa and Gojko. Local people believe Rozafa's milk still flows in the walls she died to preserve: women scrape limestone deposits from within the original Illyrian gateway and mix them with water as a medicine to increase their own milk. Scholars link the name Rozafa itself to Resafa, the place where Saint Sergius died — a saint whose veneration around Shkodra is long documented. The castle and its surroundings now form an Archaeological Park of Albania; in 2014 a Polish archaeological expedition uncovered a 14th-century hamam within the walls.