About

Ismail Kadare was born in this house in the Palorto quarter in January 1936 and grew up in it during the Italian and German occupations and the early years of the communist state. The house and the city it stood in became the material for his first major novel, Chronicle in Stone, published in 1971, which reconstructed a childhood in a city of tower houses where war arrived from above.

Kadare spent decades negotiating the line between literary prestige and regime disapproval before defecting to France in 1990, a year before the communist government fell. He was awarded the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. The house was damaged by fire and rebuilt, and opened as a small museum that holds personal objects, photographs and editions of his work.

It takes about twenty minutes. The stone roof and the cellar rooms show how these houses were actually structured, which is the thing Chronicle tries to make you feel.

Practical info