On a rocky hill rising above the Osum River, Berat Castle traces its origins to the 4th century BC, although most of the walls standing today were built in the 13th century. It was then that the fortifications were rebuilt by the Despot of Epirus, Michael I Komnenos Doukas, whose monogram in red brick can still be made out on one of the walls. The castle is far from a mere ruin: the Kala quarter inside the walls is still inhabited, a maze of cobbled lanes, traditional houses and Byzantine churches, many of them from the 13th century, such as the Church of the Holy Trinity. Here too are the ruins of the Red Mosque, one of the town's oldest, dating from the 15th century, and the "Onufri" National Iconographic Museum. Since 2008 the castle has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Historic Centres of Berat and Gjirokastra".
Opened on 27 February 1986 inside the Church of the Dormition of St Mary, built in 1797 on the foundations of an earlier church, the "Onufri" National Iconographic Museum bears the name of the great 16th-century master of Albanian painting, known for a distinctive red that became his signature. The collection holds about 200 icons and liturgical objects from the 14th to the 20th century, gathered from the churches and monasteries of the region, with works by Onufri himself, his son Nikolla, Onufri the Cypriot, David Selenica, Kostandin Shpataraku and the Çetiri family. The church is part of the experience too: its carved wooden iconostasis, made in 1807, is regarded as one of the masterpieces of Albanian woodcarving.
Berat owes its epithet "the city of one-above-another windows", often rendered as "the city of a thousand windows", to Mangalem, the quarter that stretches below the castle along the bank of the Osum. Its white houses climb the hillside in tiers, so close together that their windows seem to rest one on top of the other. Originally a large bazaar and commercial district by the river, Mangalem is traditionally the town's Muslim quarter: here stand the King's Mosque, associated with Sultan Bayezid II at the end of the 15th century; the 16th-century Lead Mosque, named after the lead that covers its dome; and the Bachelors' Mosque by the river, completed in 1828. Most of the houses seen today date from the late 18th and the 19th century. In 2008 the historic centre of Berat was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List; Mangalem is best seen from the Gorica quarter on the opposite bank.
