Eleven days in Albania and North Macedonia: painted tower blocks, then a lake full of churches

The main square is enormous and, until recently, was a roundabout. It was repaved as a single pedestrian surface in 2017 with paving stones from every region of the country, and it slopes very slightly up towards the middle so that from any edge you cannot see across it. Skanderbeg is on a horse at one end and the government ministries, built by the Italians in the 1930s, run down one side in ochre.

The mosque on the corner is the oldest building on the square, finished in 1821 after nearly thirty years of work. Religion was banned outright in Albania in 1967 and this was one of the few buildings to survive, kept as a cultural monument. It reopened in 1991 when a crowd of several thousand walked in without permission and nobody stopped them. The frescoes inside, of trees, waterfalls and bridges, are unusual in a mosque and they are worth going in for.

Next to it stands the clock tower of the 1820s, the tallest thing in Tirana for a century and a half. The climb is a tight stone spiral and the platform is small, but you get the square, the boulevard and the mountain behind the city in one turn.

Then find dinner. Albanian food is Ottoman and Italian in roughly equal parts and better than either reputation suggests, and the bill for two with wine will not reach twenty euros.

Start underground and out of town. A vast nuclear shelter was dug into the hillside on the eastern edge of Tirana in the 1970s for the political leadership, one hundred and six rooms on five levels behind a blast door, and it was kept secret until the regime fell. It opened as a museum in 2014 with the rooms left as they were, including the leader's own suite and the assembly hall, and half of it is now given over to art installations and to the occupation, the partisan war and the years that followed.

It is at the foot of the mountain on the city's eastern edge, about twenty minutes out by bus or taxi, and the entrance is a tunnel through the rock. Allow two hours and take a jumper, because it is cold in there in August.

Back in the centre, a handsome 1930s villa was built as the country's first maternity hospital and taken over within a few years as an interrogation centre, ending up as the headquarters of the domestic intelligence service until 1991. The rooms now hold the bugging equipment, the microphones concealed in furniture, the cameras in cigarette packets and the files they all fed. Walking through a listening station room by room is considerably worse than the bunker.

Finish at the strangest building in the country. A concrete ziggurat went up in 1987 as a museum to Enver Hoxha, designed by his daughter and her husband, and then spent thirty years as a conference centre, a NATO office, a television studio and a ruin that teenagers slid down. It was rebuilt as a technology school and reopened in 2023, with open staircases up the outside that anybody can climb.

Two and a half hours south through the hills. Berat sits where the river cuts through a ridge, and the first sight of it from the bus is the thing itself: two facing slopes of white houses with dark wooden windows, stacked so tightly that each row seems to stand on the roofs below it.

The lower Muslim quarter runs up from the river on the castle side, a warren of stone lanes, half of them stepped, with the houses turned side-on to the slope so that every one of them gets the same light. It is a working neighbourhood, not a preserved one, and there are people hanging out washing above your head.

Cross the old bridge to the quarter on the other bank, which was the Christian one, and look back. This is the view: the entire opposite hillside, the castle wall along the top of it, and the windows in rows. Late afternoon is when the light is on it.

The ethnographic museum on the way up to the castle occupies an eighteenth century merchant's house and shows how these buildings actually worked: the winter rooms downstairs, the summer gallery above, the loom, the olive press, the separate quarters. Twenty minutes, and every house you walk past afterwards makes more sense.

The castle is not a monument you visit but a village you walk into. The walls date largely from the thirteenth century on foundations six centuries older, and inside them are cobbled lanes, vines over the paths, fig trees, chickens and about thirty households who have always lived there. There is no ticket barrier that changes that: people are going about their day and you are walking through it.

Something like twenty churches were built inside the walls and a handful survive. The largest, the church of the Dormition of St Mary, holds a museum of icons named after the sixteenth century painter who worked here and whose red is unlike anybody else's. Onufri signed his work, which was unusual in the Orthodox world, and painted faces with an individuality that looks a century ahead of its date.

Take the time to walk to the far end of the walled area, where the cliff drops away and the whole valley opens up. Most visitors stop at the first viewpoint and miss it.

Come down for the afternoon and look at the mosque in the lower bazaar, built in the fifteenth century by the Ottoman sultan and one of the oldest in the country. Behind it stands the meeting house of a Sufi order, a small square room with a carved and painted wooden ceiling that is the best interior in Berat.

The long day. Berat to Ohrid takes five or six hours with a change, running east along the Shkumbin valley on the alignment of the Roman road that connected the Adriatic to Constantinople, then climbing to the watershed and dropping to the lake. Take food and do not plan anything for the morning.

If your route brings you over the southern border you pass the monastery at the far end of the lake, right on the frontier, and it is worth breaking the journey for an hour. There has been a monastery here since about 900, founded by a disciple of Cyril and Methodius who helped put the Slavonic alphabet to work; the present church holds his tomb, and the story is that you can still hear his heartbeat through the stone if you put your ear to it. Behind the buildings, the springs of the Black Drim come out of the ground in a wooded pool, cold, clear and full of trout, and there are flat-bottomed boats to take you round them.

Get into Ohrid in the late afternoon and go straight to the water. The small church that everybody has seen photographs of stands on a headland of rock above the lake, fourteenth century, three sides of it over a drop. There is a path along the shore from the town, on boardwalks pinned to the cliff.

Sit outside it and wait for the sun to go. It goes down behind the Albanian mountains on the far shore, and this is the fifteen minutes the town is famous for.

Start at the cathedral in the lower town, which is the reason Ohrid matters. A church has stood here since the ninth century and the building you walk into is largely eleventh, put up when this was the seat of an archbishopric governing a large part of the Balkans. Its frescoes are among the oldest and best preserved anywhere in the Orthodox world, and they survived because the Ottomans whitewashed them when the building became a mosque. They were uncovered in the 1950s.

Climb from there. Halfway up the hill, a Hellenistic theatre is cut into the slope, dug out of back gardens in the 1980s and now used for concerts in summer. It is the only Greek theatre in the country. The Romans widened it for gladiators, which the local population disliked so much that they buried it after the empire fell.

At the top of the hill are the walls of the fortress, built in the tenth century when Ohrid was the seat of a tsar who ruled most of the peninsula from here. The interior is grass and archaeology; the point is the walk round the ramparts, with the lake on one side and the roofs of the old town falling away on the other.

The afternoon is for the lanes. Ohrid's old town is small, steep and full of chapels the size of a garage, most of them open, most of them painted inside, and nearly all of them free.

Ninety minutes over the pass and down onto the Pelagonia plain, which is flat, enormous, and grows most of the country's wheat and apples. Bitola sits at the southern end of it under a wall of mountains.

Walk out onto the pedestrian street that runs the length of the centre, which is called the Wide Alley and is neither wide nor an alley. It is a street of two and three storey neoclassical houses in pale colours, built in the second half of the nineteenth century when Bitola was the Ottoman administrative capital of the region and a dozen European powers kept consulates here. Several of the buildings still carry the coats of arms.

The clock tower at the north end went up in 1664 and is one of the tallest in the country. Beside it are the mosques, and behind those the old bazaar, which is where the Ottoman town carries on: low buildings, small trades, a covered market of thick stone walls built in the fifteenth century for the goods worth locking up.

Then come back to the high street at about seven, order something on a terrace and watch. The entire town walks up and down it in the early evening, in both directions, for about two hours. It has been happening for a hundred and fifty years and it is the best free entertainment in North Macedonia.

Two kilometres south of town, in flat fields, is a Greek city founded by Philip of Macedon in the middle of the fourth century BC and named after Heracles. The Romans put their road through it and it became a bishop's seat, and then it was abandoned after a series of earthquakes and Slavic raids in the sixth century, which is why so much of it is still in the ground.

Two things stand out. The theatre, cut into a slope and used for performances again in summer. And the mosaic floors of two early Christian basilicas, laid in the fifth and sixth centuries, with trees, birds, deer and a fountain worked in coloured stone across an area the size of a tennis court. They are covered against frost for much of the year and uncovered from about May, so check before going in winter.

In the afternoon, the other history. From 1916 to 1918 the front line of the First World War in the Balkans ran across the hills you can see from the high street, and Bitola was shelled for two years from the ridge above it. There are French, Serbian and German war cemeteries around the town, laid out in the 1920s and 1930s and quietly maintained ever since. The French one holds more than thirteen thousand men.

Almost nobody comes to these. They are half an hour from the centre by taxi, they are open, and they are the reason the town lost half its population and never got it back.

Three hours up the plain and over the hills, past Prilep's tobacco fields and the granite outcrops around it. Skopje's bus station is next to the railway station, twenty minutes' walk from the centre or a very cheap taxi.

Go straight to the river. The stone bridge across the Vardar is the hinge of the city: Roman piers, rebuilt in the fifteenth century, and the crossing point ever since. South of it is the remade square with its statues and marble; north of it, within four paces, the Ottoman town.

The bazaar above the bridge is one of the largest still working in the Balkans, a hill of lanes with mosques on the terraces, jewellers in one street and grill houses in the next. It is a market rather than a heritage site, which is why the prices are what they are.

Have dinner in it. Then, if there is light left, find the largest of the caravanserais, a sixteenth century inn built round a double-arcaded courtyard for merchants and their animals, which now stands empty and open and is the quietest place in central Skopje.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje in 1910 and left at eighteen, and the memorial house on the main shopping street stands where her family's parish church was. It is a small, strange, glassy building with a chapel on the upper floor, and it is free. Whatever you make of her, the ground floor is a useful account of what the city was like when it had Catholic Albanian, Orthodox Macedonian, Muslim Turkish and Sephardic Jewish quarters all within a few streets of each other.

Then the national museum, which sits inside the bazaar and is much better than its shabby exterior suggests. The ethnographic floor is the one to spend time on: room after room of regional costume, every valley with its own, embroidered to a standard that takes a moment to register. There are casts and copies of medieval church painting too, which is the easiest way to see work that is otherwise scattered across locked village churches.

In the afternoon, get out of the basin. A cable car runs from halfway up the mountain south of the city to the summit, where there is a very large steel cross put up in 2002, a cafe and a view over the whole Skopje plain to the mountains on the Kosovo border. Allow half a day with the drive or bus up to the cable car station, and go on a clear day or not at all.

Come down for the evening on the south bank, which is where the young city drinks, and compare it with last night on the north bank.

One last building before the airport, and it is the right one to finish on. The old railway station on the southern edge of the centre was torn in half by the earthquake of 26 July 1963 and the ruin was left standing, with the clock on its front stopped at seventeen minutes past five, the minute it happened.

The surviving wing is now the city museum. It covers Skopje from the Roman town onwards, but the earthquake room is the one people come for: the photographs, the international rescue effort, and the plan drawn up afterwards by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange to rebuild the whole centre as a single modernist composition. Only fragments of it were built, and the marble of the 2010s was later applied to those fragments, which is the last piece of the puzzle.

The airport is twenty kilometres east and there is an hourly shuttle from the bus station beside the railway terminus, plus taxis at a fixed rate. Allow an hour more than you need in summer.

If your flight leaves from Tirana instead, there are coaches back across the border most days, taking about six hours by way of Ohrid or the newer road through Kosovo.