Saranda - Ancient Onchesmos

This small, but beautifully illustrated guide book covers the ancient port of Saranda. Twenty kilometres north of the UNESCO site of Butrint, Saranda was a harbour during Roman times and again in the Ottoman era. Saranda's name has changed several times, each time reflecting its Mediterranean-wide connections: Onchesmos comes from Anchises, the Trojan, whose union with Aphrodite on Mt Ida resulted in a son, Aeneas. Dionysius of Halicarnassus called Onchesmos the harbour of Anchises and tells of how the Trojans dedicated a temple to Aphrodite there. Archaeological interest began in the port in 1913, during the second Balkan war, undertaken to show the site's Greekness in the face of Albanian nationalism. Surveys were made on behalf of the state from the 1950s to '90s, when archaeology was stopped in the face of construction and development.