The city of silver and gold
Novobërdë
Six hundred years ago the ridge above these houses held one of the great towns of the Balkans. A chronicler of the day called it “a city of silver, and truly of gold.” What is left of it stands an hour’s walk from the gate.
The silver came out of this hill with gold already in it. The miners called it glama, and at its best it ran a third gold. The fortress went up around 1285 to guard the seams; Saxon miners came for the digging, merchants from Dubrovnik for the trade, and the town between them grew to four or five thousand people inside the walls, in a century when most towns in Europe held fewer than two thousand.
It answered to almost nobody. Novobërdë struck its own coin from 1349 and was given its own law: the Mining Code of 1412, fifty-one articles on the mines and twenty-two on the town, written for this hill alone. At its height it gave up some six tonnes of silver a year. The Balkans in those years gave Europe a fifth of its silver, and no hill gave the Balkans more than this one.
First recorded
In the 1320s
Its own mint
Striking silver from 1349
Its own law
The Mining Code of 1412
The last stand
It took Mehmed the Conqueror himself, cannon, and forty days to bring the city down in 1455. One boy taken from its gates grew up to write the most famous memoir of the medieval Balkans.
Up there today
Walls, wind and hardly anybody
What stands now is the hilltop citadel, conserved and partly rebuilt under an EU–UNESCO programme, with the older walls trailing down the flanks and the dug foundations of the town below it. A medieval stone cross is still set into the outer wall, and the ruins of the miners’ own church lie in Bostan itself, the village at the bottom of our road.
There is no ticket office and there are no opening hours; the ridge is open to whoever climbs it. The walk up from our gate takes about an hour through the pines, the lane carries you most of the way if you would rather drive, and the circuit of the walls is twenty minutes with the wind for company. Ask at the door and we will point you at the path.
- Free, and open around the clock
- Conserved under an EU–UNESCO programme
- The path starts at our gate
Fortress photography: Arben Llapashtica and Arian Mavriqi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Back down the hill
Six hundred years of history on the ridge, and a warm house with your name on it at the bottom of the path.