KORÇA ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM

This regional museum (Muzeu Arkeologjik i Korçës) is housed in a superb 1842 Ottoman konak (inn), behind the cathedral in the Old Korça district. Founded in 1985, it's a little depressing with its collapsing ceilings and old-fashioned shop windows. Nor are there any truly precious objects on display. Yet the Korça region was, along with the Maliq culture, the cradle of agriculture in the Balkans during the Neolithic period. But anything of real value is either on display at the National History Museum in Tirana, or has been stolen. In fact, on the second floor, take a look at the moving Illyrian statuettes recently recovered by the courts, but of which we know nothing. There are some pleasant surprises, however, such as these magnificent Neolithic bronze jewels and brooches from the Barç burial mound (3 km to the north-east). More impressive is the skeleton of a pregnant woman dated 3,000 BC. It was unearthed at the Kamenica tumulus. For further information, contact the French-Albanian Archaeological Mission of the Korça Basin. Set up in 1993, it has recently been working on the Sovjan site (17 km to the north-west), where traces of a Neolithic lake-dwelling town were discovered when Lake Maliq was drained in the 1950s. A number of ceramics (copies and originals) from this site are on display in the museum's first rooms.