If you're coming from Italy there are direct ferries from Trieste, Ancona and Bari, and there are also services from Koper in Slovenia. In 500 BC an Illyrian fortress was already guarding the crossing west of the city where the Buna and Drin rivers meet. The road to Kosovo also begins here. Shkodra's skyline is dominated by the new and impressive Sheik Zamil Abdullah Al-Zamil Mosque , and next to that is the Muzeo Popullor , which exhibits recent paintings and historic photos upstairs and has an impressive archaeological collection downstairs. Shkodra was also the most influential Catholic city in Albania, and the impressive Franciscan Church on Rruga Ndre Mjeda is now a church again after serving as an auditorium during Albania's official period of atheism.
Nursing mothers come here today to smear their breasts with the milky water.
Below the fortress is the many-domed Leaden Mosque , the only mosque in town to escape destruction during the 1966 Cultural Revolution. Virgil claimed that the Trojans settled Butrint, but no evidence of this has yet been found, and the site has been pored over by archaeologists. Treasure hunters from Italy lifted many of the antiquities before the war, but most have since been returned and are on display at the National Museum of History in Tirana. Greeks settled Butrint during the 6th century BC, although the area had been settled long before by the Illyrians. Within a century of the Greeks arriving, Butrint had become a fortified trading city with its own acropolis , the ruins of which you can still visit.