Butrint's power was always geographic. The site controls access to the Straits of Corfu, sitting at the junction between mainland Greece and Magna Graecia, the Greek colonies of southern Italy. The Chaonians, a northwestern Greek tribe, established it as one of their two major ports, the other being Onchesmos -- modern Saranda. By the 4th century BCE, Butrint had grown into a proper city with a theater, a sanctuary to Asclepius, and an agora surrounded by three circuit walls. The outermost wall, built around 380 BCE, stretched 870 meters and featured bastions, five gates, and the Lion Gate that still partially stands. The theater's stones carry an unusual archive: hundreds of inscriptions recording the manumission of enslaved people, their names -- almost exclusively Greek -- offering a rare window into who lived and labored in this small but strategic city.

Rome absorbed Butrint gradually. By 228 BCE it was a Roman protectorate, and in 44 BCE Julius Caesar designated it a colony to reward veterans who had fought against Pompey. The plan drew protest from an unexpected quarter: Titus Pomponius Atticus, a Roman landowner with estates near Butrint, complained to his friend Cicero, who lobbied the Senate to block mass colonization. The effort partially succeeded -- only small numbers of settlers arrived. After his victory at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Augustus renewed the colonial project with more enthusiasm. The city doubled in size. An aqueduct brought water from the hills, Roman baths rose beside the Greek theater, a forum complex anchored the civic center, and a nymphaeum decorated the approach. Then, in the 3rd century CE, an earthquake leveled much of the expanded city, collapsing buildings on the Vrina Plain and in the forum. Butrint survived, diminished, into late antiquity.

Christianity brought a second architectural boom. In the early 6th century, Butrint became a bishopric, and its builders constructed one of the largest paleochristian baptisteries in the Mediterranean, floored with elaborate mosaics. The Grand Basilica rose on the settlement's northeast side. Byzantine Emperor Anastasius likely rebuilt the city walls around the same time. For the next several centuries, Butrint became a prize contested by nearly every power in the region. The Normans assaulted it. The Fourth Crusade in 1204 fragmented the Byzantine Empire, and Butrint fell to the breakaway Despotate of Epirus. Charles of Anjou seized it in 1267. The Byzantines retook it in 1274, prompting an unlikely alliance between the Catholic Charles and the Orthodox Despot Nikephoros, who together expelled the Byzantines in 1278. Venice purchased the area along with Corfu in 1386, but cared mainly about Corfu. Butrint declined again.

Modern archaeology arrived at Butrint wrapped in politics. Mussolini's Fascist government sent an expedition in 1928, led by Luigi Maria Ugolini -- a competent archaeologist despite his mission's geopolitical motives. Ugolini uncovered the Hellenistic and Roman city, naming the gates after Homeric Troy. He died in 1936, but excavations continued until the war. After the communist takeover in 1944, Enver Hoxha's Albania banned foreign archaeologists. Albanian scholars including Hasan Ceka carried on the work alone. When Nikita Khrushchev visited the ruins in 1959, he suggested Hoxha convert the site into a submarine base. Hoxha declined, and Butrint endured. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in 1992, the same year Albania's communist regime collapsed. A plan to build an airport nearby was stopped by lobbying, though not before UNESCO briefly placed Butrint on its List of World Heritage in Danger due to looting and neglect.

Climate change now threatens what centuries of conquest could not destroy. The ancient theater and Roman forum sometimes flood with rising water levels, and a new management plan addresses both cultural preservation and the natural environment of Butrint National Park. The site remains accessible from Saranda along a road originally built for Khrushchev's visit, upgraded in 2010 amid environmental controversy. Day-trippers from Corfu arrive by ferry and hydrofoil, walking through the same Lion Gate that the Chaonians fortified twenty-four centuries ago. Butrint's power has always been its layering -- each civilization building on the ruins of the last, none quite erasing what came before. The Greek theater seats still face the stage. The Roman columns still frame the sky. The Byzantine mosaics still hold their color beneath the Albanian oaks. What makes Butrint extraordinary is not any single period, but the visible accumulation of all of them.