Overview
Butrint occupies a low peninsula where Lake Butrint meets the Ionian Sea, opposite Corfu. Greek settlers founded a sanctuary of Asclepius by the 4th century BCE; the town appears in Vergil’s Aeneid as Buthrotum. Under Rome it became a colony under Augustus, with a theatre seating about 2,500, a forum, aqueducts, and lavish bath complexes. Late antique churches and a large baptistery with a circular mosaic of peacocks and vines mark Christian Butrint. Venetian and Ottoman walls crown the acropolis.
Modern excavation began with Luigi Maria Ugolini’s Italian mission in the 1920s–30s. After 1991 Albanian–British teams under the Butrint Foundation and Institute of Archaeology clarified the urban sequence, harbour siltation, and the medieval castle. Finds include Latin inscriptions, sculpture, and evidence for olive-oil and fish processing.
The landscape is as important as the monuments: a submerged Roman road, wetlands that once fed fisheries, and the triangular fortress that controlled the channel. Pair Butrint with Delphi for sanctuary urbanism and with Ostia Antica for a Roman harbour town that also silted into quiet ruin.