Korçë

Korçë sits high enough — over 800 meters — that I needed a jacket in the evening even in July, which after weeks on the Riviera felt like a small miracle. It’s also, by wide local consensus, the birthplace of Albanian coffee culture, and the city takes the claim seriously: on my first morning I counted eleven cafés within two blocks of my guesthouse, every one of them full by 9am with old men in flat caps arguing quietly over small cups and younger crowds nursing macchiatos that would not embarrass Turin.

The Old Bazaar, restored but not sanitized, is where I spent most of a slow afternoon — cobbled lanes of stone and timber shopfronts selling copperware, wool socks, and honey from the surrounding hills, a functioning market rather than a museum piece. A few streets over stands the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, an enormous Orthodox church rebuilt after communist-era demolition, its interior still smelling faintly of fresh paint and incense in equal measure. Korçë also carries a distinctly Franco-Albanian streak — the city was under French administration briefly during the First World War, and the elegant boulevard running through the center, with its plane trees and shuttered townhouses, still reads faintly like a provincial French town that took a wrong turn into the Balkans.

We ate dinner at a family-run place near the National Museum of Medieval Art, working through qofte and a bottle of raki i mani, the mulberry raki this region is known for, while a table of locals next to us sang along to something from a portable speaker without a hint of self-consciousness.

When to go: June through September gives comfortable highland temperatures; the city also hosts a lively beer festival in August that’s worth timing your visit around if crowds and live music appeal.