Three days in Berat: two old towns staring at each other across a river

Start below the hill and look up. Mangalem is one steep face of whitewashed Ottoman houses with dark timber window bays, packed so tightly that the lanes between them are staircases. It was the Muslim quarter under the Ottomans and it is where three of the town's old mosques still stand.

The smallest and prettiest of them is at the bottom of the slope by the boulevard, built in 1827 for the unmarried craftsmen and shop boys of the bazaar, who were not allowed to pray with the married men. The outside walls carry painted panels of houses, trees and plants, and it is a two minute look rather than a visit.

Then walk up. There is no route through Mangalem, only a suggestion, and getting lost in it is the entire point: courtyards, vines, cats, an old woman with a bucket, and every so often a gap in the houses with the whole valley in it.

In the late afternoon cross the river. The stone bridge dates from the 1780s and lands you in Gorica, the Christian quarter, which is lower, greener and quieter, with orchards behind the houses. Walk east along the bank until the town is behind you and then turn round: Mangalem is lit gold, the castle sits on the hill above it, and this is the photograph.

Go up early, before the heat. The road climbs from the top of Mangalem in about twenty minutes over cobbles that were laid for hooves rather than shoes; a taxi will take you to the gate for a couple of euros if the knees object.

What is inside is not a monument. The fortress walls are mostly thirteenth century, on foundations going back to the fourth century BC, and they enclose several hectares of hilltop that has never stopped being lived in. There are lanes, gardens, chickens, guesthouses, a couple of restaurants and around a hundred households, and scattered among them are the ruins or the remains of a dozen and more Byzantine and Ottoman churches. You will walk into somebody's courtyard by mistake at least once and nobody will mind.

The best of the churches is the largest, built in 1797 on tenth century foundations, and it holds the icon museum. Onufri was a sixteenth century painter and archpriest who worked across this region, and he is famous for a red he mixed himself and which nobody has managed to reproduce since. The paintings are hung with the carved and gilded iconostasis still in place, and the room is dim, cool and almost always empty.

Then walk to the far western end of the walls, where the ground falls away and you can see the river, both quarters, the plain and the mountains at once. The small Holy Trinity church stands on the slope just below, thirteenth or fourteenth century, cross-shaped and built of alternating stone and brick, and it is the postcard from this side.

Come down for a late lunch, and give the afternoon to the river.

Two things left, both at the bottom of the hill and ten minutes apart.

The ethnographic museum occupies an eighteenth century merchant's house on the way up to the castle, and the house is the exhibit: a stone ground floor for storage and animals, a wooden upper floor for living, a carved ceiling, a room the women used and a room the men used, and the deep window bays that gave the town its nickname. The costumes and tools downstairs are interesting; the building is what you will remember.

Then the Lead Mosque, put up in the 1550s and named for the sheets of lead that cover its dome, which was an expensive way to roof a building and a deliberate statement about who was in charge. It sits in the modern town among the shops, and it is a reminder that Berat was a working Ottoman city long before it was a place people came to photograph.

Coffee on the boulevard afterwards. The evening promenade here, when the whole town walks up and down the same three hundred metres, is worth staying for if your bus is late enough.