Tirana

Tirana lies in central Albania, surrounded by hills and mountains, with Mount Dajti rising to the east. Settlement in the area reaches back to antiquity: the remains of a Roman house were later incorporated into a church with a mosaic floor. In the Middle Ages, Venetian documents recorded a village of Tirana, and Ottoman registers described a district containing many inhabited places.

By the early sixteenth century the scholar Marin Barleti distinguished between Little Tirana and Great Tirana. A bazaar and watermills had begun to develop before the local ruler Sulejman Bargjini built a mosque, a commercial centre and a bathhouse in 1614. The Et'hem Bey Mosque was completed by its founder's son in 1821. The Toptani family of Krujë held power in Tirana from 1816, as the settlement continued its life as an Ottoman provincial town.