Orikum

The origins of Oricum, between Illyrians and Greeks

The name Orikum has its roots in ancient Oricum, a port that Greek sources traced, according to legend, to sailors who arrived from Colchis on the trail of the Argonauts and who, weary of the pursuit, settled on this shore. Beyond the myth, the area was inhabited by Illyrian tribes linked to the Chaonian and Epirote world, and it soon became a port contested between Illyrians and Greek colonists overlooking the southern Adriatic. Its position, sheltered at the mouth of the Gulf of Vlorë and protected by the Karaburun peninsula, made it a natural stopover along the routes connecting Greece to Italy, an obligatory stage for anyone who had to cross the Strait of Otranto at its narrowest point between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

The name of Oricum enters the great narrative of Roman history in 48 BC, when Julius Caesar, evading the Pompeian fleet that patrolled the Adriatic, landed on the coast of Epirus right near this port to give battle to Pompey and carry the civil war eastward. Oricum surrendered almost without a fight, and became a support base for the operations that would soon lead to the siege of Dyrrachium and the decisive battle of Pharsalus. The chronicles of the time, starting with Caesar's own accounts, describe a strategic city, equipped with arsenals and a harbour capable of hosting entire fleets: a role that Orikum, quietly, played for centuries as a hinge between the Greek world and the Italic one.

The Lagoon of Orikum

Behind the beach opens the Lagoon of Orikum, a sheet of brackish water separated from the sea by a sandy bar and fed by fresh water flowing down from the hills behind. It is a precious transitional environment, a refuge for herons, coots and, during migration periods, for birds that stop along the Adriatic flyway; the salt-tolerant vegetation that surrounds it forms a flat, luminous landscape, quite different from the mountains visible just a little further south. For local fishermen the lagoon has always been a source of mullet and eels, caught with traditional techniques that still survive, on a small scale, alongside the offshore fishing practised in the open gulf.

The Llogara Pass and the protected waters of Karaburun

From Orikum the main road begins to climb towards the Llogara Pass, at over a thousand metres above sea level, where the national park of the same name shelters woods of black pine, beech and juniper overlooking the Ionian Sea from above: within a few hairpin bends you pass from the Mediterranean climate of the gulf to an almost alpine air, with viewpoints from which the eye takes in the Ceraunian mountains and the coast descending towards Dhërmi and Himarë. Crossing Llogara historically meant leaving the Gulf of Vlorë behind to enter the most isolated stretch of the Riviera. Facing Orikum, closing the same gulf, lies instead the uninhabited Karaburun peninsula and, a little further on, the island of Sazan, for decades a closed military base and therefore left almost untouched: together they give their name to the Karaburun-Sazan National Marine Park, the first established in Albania, with spectacular seabeds, submerged caves and the Bay of Grama, where generations of sailors have carved names and symbols into the limestone rock since antiquity.