Travel Guide Elbasan

Elbasan/Elbasani has a population of around 78,000 (140,000 including the rest of the municipality). The capital of Elbasan district, it lies 40 km southeast of Tirana, 63 km east of Divjaka, 69 km northeast of Berat and 84 km northwest of Pogradec. Minibus connections to Tirana, Durrës, Divjaka, Berat, Librazhd, Vlora, Pogradec and Korça.Albania's fourth most populous city is surrounded by beautiful churches and pleasant farmhouses. But when you arrive from Tirana, the first thing you see is a huge, derelict steel complex. Built between 1971 and 1974 with Chinese assistance, this site, known as "Party Steel" (Çeliku i Partisë), employed almost 8,000 people. Until the fall of the regime, no fewer than twenty chimneys belched out multicolored smoke, spreading toxic substances over the country's most fertile land, now unfit for cultivation. Situated on the banks of the Shkumbin river, between the Myzeqa plain and the Skanderbeg mountains, Elbasan was originally a simple Roman trading post on the Via Egnatia, founded in the 2nd century. In the Byzantine era, the town developed into a citadel, which gradually gave it its name: Neokastron ("new castle") in Greek, then il-Basan ("fortress") in Ottoman Turkish. Located within the fortifications, its powerful Orthodox bishopric became a major intellectual center of the Rilindja Kombëtare movement for Albanian emancipation in the 19th century.