MANGALEM DISTRICT
The historic center of Berat, a Unesco World Heritage site. It's the "city of a thousand windows" that you see in photos everywhere.
This old residential district (Lagjja Mangalem) has earned Berat its reputation as the "city of a thousand windows" with its 18th-19th century houses with white facades huddled together on the hillside, its cobbled alleys, its fountains and its old mosques. This magnificent ensemble, originally populated by Muslims, is one of the three districts in the center of Berat listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008. The other two are Gorica, opposite, on the left bank of the Osum, and Kalaja (the "citadel"), on the hill above Mangalem. Nevertheless, not everything is perfect. In the years since the classification, new lodges and hotels of various styles have broken the beautiful unity. Fortunately, in the face of the admonitions of UNESCO, the municipality has cleaned up a bit since 2015, destroying some buildings and imposing standards now rather well respected. This is good, because Mangalem is one of the first examples in the history of the Balkans of a city developing outside its fortifications, and this from the fifteenth century. As for the name of the district, it could come from the Indo-European term mangalam ("luck", "clarity" or "blessed"). But the expression "city of a thousand windows" was born from a recent confusion. The Albanians used to call Berat një mbi një, literally "one on one", referring to its houses built "one on top of the other". By proximity of sounds, it became një mijë, "a thousand".
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