The castle of Preza stands on a hilltop in central Albania, above the plain and within sight of the mountains that close it to the east. Its position explains everything about it: a fortified enclosure here watched the roads between the coast and the interior, and the walls, corner towers and gateway that survive still command the horizon in every direction. Inside the enclosure stands the mosque of Preza, a modest building with a slender minaret rising just above the ramparts. The pairing is characteristic of the region, where fortresses passed through successive hands and acquired, in the Ottoman period, the religious buildings needed by their garrisons and the villages that grew around them. The village itself, with its stone houses and terraces looking out over the plain, forms the natural setting of the site, which is today a place of excursion as much as a monument. Filmed in 4K, with aerial sequences that reveal the geometry of the walls and the sweep of the plain, the programme offers a compact and highly visual portrait, well suited to short heritage formats and to strands on the fortified architecture of the Balkans.
