- Sep 20, 2017
- 11,143
- 20,657
- 28,180
Pending the full stage-by-stage analysis, let's get going.
The race’s opening act connects the country’s two largest cities. They are close enough to be linked by a proper-length ITT, but seeing as this is both the first stage and 2025 a road stage makes much more sense, and so that’s what we’re getting. It doesn’t have the elevation gain to be considered a mid-mountain stage, but this is still far from an easy opener.
Map and profile
Start
The first-ever major race on Albanian soil starts from Durrës, the country’s second city and main port. For the purpose of this project, it’s rather fortunate that the Giro has chosen Durrës for the first stage start, because to the 99% of you unfamiliar with Albanian history, I’m going to have go through a little bit of it to make sense of my city writeups and there really isn’t a better place to start than the city that was the most important in ancient times.
And no, unlike RCS, I am not going to be using the Italian names anywhere – I’m very glad I set that precedent for myself in the 2024 Tour analysis, because… well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Durrës was founded by Greek colonists as Epidamnus in 627 BC. It was already a prosperous port long before it became one of the first cities outside modern Italy to fall under Roman control in the late 3rd century BC. This turned out to be an enormous boon to the city, as the Romans chose it as the starting point of the Via Egnatia, which connected it to Constantinople. Together with the Via Appia and the short sea voyage from Brindisi to Durrës, which was rechristened as Dyrrachium, this was the main route from Roma to the east. This made it not just a key economic hub, but also of great strategic importance. Most notably, it was the site of the first major battle in Caesar’s civil war in 48 BC (Pompey won, but failed to land a decisive blow, he then pursued Caesar all the way to Pharsalus in Greece… the rest, as they say, is history). In the Byzantine era, Durrës remained significant as a key link between east and west, but decline was inevitable in the turmoil of the post-Roman world. Repeated conquests in the second half of the Middle Ages, when the Byzantines, Bulgarians, Normans, Venetians, Sicilians, Serbs and the Albanians themselves all held the city at least once, accelerated the decline. The final nail in the coffin were the decades when Dürres was the last Venetian holdout in an Albanian coastline otherwise entirely conquered by the Ottomans, and upon its fall in 1501 it became rather unimportant for the next centuries.
After dwindling to just 1000 inhabitants by the mid-19th century, Durrës finally rebounded in the final decades before Albanian independence in 1912. However, Albania was one of the weakest states in the region and with first the Balkans and soon thereafter all of Europe engulfed in war, Serbia, Bulgaria, Italy and Austria-Hungary all occupied at least part of the country for a time during the first post-Ottoman years. Durrës, which saw military action and damage on multiple occasions during this period, served as the capital for a time, until Tirana was established as such in 1920. After the First World War, a highly unstable Albania remained under simultaneous pressure from Greece, Yugoslavia and especially Italy (who occupied Durrës for a time – this is why the capital was moved), and only American diplomatic intervention preserved its independence. The Yugoslavs enabled the permanent ascension of the Zog (later King Zog I) in 1925, but his autocratic regime soon turned to now-Fascist Italy for support. While the influx of Italian money was of particular benefit to Durrës, which established itself as the main port and tourist destination in this period, political and economic support soon turned to dependence and exploitation. Zog I eventually attempted to put up resistance, but was unable to do so and thus it should come as no surprise that the eventual annexation in 1939 was swift. For Albania, therefore, World War II was characterised by forced Italianization at the hands of the fascists – hence why it totally isn’t problematic that RCS are calling Durrës Durazzo, especially not given that this Grande Partenza is taking place in the light of renewed rapprochement between Albania and an Italian government led by the direct successors of said fascists.
Oh, right, I’m not supposed to get too political on this forum. In any case, Italian control of Albania ended with the collapse of the Mussolini government in 1943, and while the Nazis propped him up as a puppet in Northern Italy, they took direct control of Albania. Occupation finally came to an end the year after, when a communist resistance force liberated the country. In spite of the main theatres of war being far away, three percent of the population did not survive these five brutal years. Initially, Yugoslavia gained significant control once more, but this period abruptly ended with Tito’s falling out with the USSR in 1948. Communist Albania was led for most of its existence by Enver Hoxha, a hardliner even by communist standards. Hoxha, the kind of guy who claimed Tito was an anti-Marxist, split from the Soviets over what he saw as the betrayal of Stalin’s legacy in 1956, and followed the exact same pattern with China in anger at Nixon’s visit to the country in 1972. In part because of his repeated alienation of just about everyone else, Hoxha was noted for his paranoia, and nothing exemplifies this as well as the 750000 bunkers his government famously built all over Albania. Needless to say, none of this helped the country, and by the time of his own death in 1985, Albania was both the poorest and the most isolated country in Europe, to say nothing of the severe repression he inflicted on his people. But hey, at least Hoxha got to claim his was the last true communist government in the world.
In spite of a more or less peaceful transition away from dictatorship, the post-communist era got off to a particularly bad start in Albania, with increasingly corrupt governments at best turning a blind eye and at worst covertly supporting pyramid schemes in which possibly more than half the population invested. Everything came crashing down in 1997 and the country largely fell into violent anarchy as a result. By the time UN forces had restored a semblance of order, an estimated 2000 people had been killed.
However, the 21st century has seen continuous improvement, and for all the troubled history, growing pains and myriad other issues, at least Albania has finally shed its decades-long status as the poorest country in Europe. Durrës itself, with its orientation towards trade and tourism, has benefited particularly well from the end of isolationism. And between the Roman amphitheatre and the early Byzantine fortifications (the legacy of Emperor Anastasius I, who was born in the city), it has plenty of surviving history to show off too.
(picture by Agonsta24 at Wikimedia Commons)
Route
Okay, that wound up being a lot less like my usual introduction and more of a Libertine in the Race Design Thread-esque dissertation than I’d anticipated. To those of you who stopped reading it halfway through: welcome back, I promise I’ll talk about cycling now.
The first third is entirely flat, initially heading south through the coastal plains and then turning east to head up the Shkumbin valley. This section contains both intermediate sprints, in Paper and on the outskirts of Elbasan, Albania’s fourth-largest city. As ever, even though both sprints are marked the same, the first one hands out points for the ciclamino jersey and the second for the Polti-Bardiani intermediate sprint classification. Rather than heading into the city proper, the route heads north here to climb out of the valley up the first KOM of this edition: Gracen. The first 10.7k of this climb formed the MTF of the 2023 Tour of Albania, won by Max Stedman. Its elevation gain is decent, but the gradients are quite unremarkable.
I would also like to point out that the URL for the image below reads 2025/03. Just in case you were wondering if there’s any good reason we didn’t get the full route until a week and a half before the race.
Even though this was the main road to Tirana prior to the opening of the motorway, the descent is actually technical in parts. The road to the capital goes through the low pass at Sauk, which is the location of the totally-not-a-conflict of interest time bonification sprint. Unlike in previous years, the bonification sprints hand out six, four and two seconds for the first three riders.
By the time the riders have made it to this sprint, they are well within the Tirana suburbs, but that doesn’t mean they’re about to finish yet. Because if there’s one thing RCS love this edition, it’s local circuits. On this stage, we do almost two full laps (the first lap is missing the first few hundred metres, as they join the route right after the finish line). The main feature is the KOM at Surrel, which is 4.9k at 5.5% if you exclude the initial false flat. All the difficulty is in the ramp after said false flat.
Finish
The descent looks twisty on the map, but isn’t particularly challenging. It ends at 4.3 kilometres from the line, where it turns to a false flat (1.4% on average) that lasts until inside the final kilometre. The final turn, at 500 metres from the line, takes the riders away from the Lanë river, past the Tirana Pyramid (the last and perhaps most famous of the communist era building projects) and onto the main boulevard. It looks like it drags uphill on Streetview, but thanks to Albania’s surprisingly good geoportal I was able to measure it and find that it averages a whopping 0.7%.
And now it’s time for something I’m very glad I didn’t have to do at the start of the post: talk about Tirana. It’s not that I have anything against the city, but rather that it plays no role in Albanian history until it became the capital almost by happenstance in 1920. Founded by the Ottomans in 1624, it had grown to about 10000 inhabitants prior to independence, but remained more of a provincial town in the shadow of older, larger cities like Shkodër, Vlorë and of course Durrës. So why exactly was it chosen as the capital city? As I mentioned in my long introduction, the Italians had seized Durrës and all the other main cities (if not also under occupation) were just as easily accessible from the sea. A temporary capital was therefore needed, and thanks to its central location and the existence of at least some buildings to house the government, Tirana got the nod. This arrangement was then made permanent in 1925, and only after that did the city really start to grow. Hence, modern Tirana is almost entirely less than a century old, a mixture of the heavily fascist-influenced original city plan, Hoxha-era highrise, postcommunist (re)development and often-illegal urban sprawl, together combining for a city with almost four times the population of any other Albanian city.
The entire final straight. They use the right half for the finish, then loop around Mother Teresa Square (in front of the polytechnical university in the background) and come down the left half to start the circuit. (picture by Radosław Botev at Wikimedia Commons)
What to expect?
Attacks on the final climb are inevitable, but chances are things come back together for a sprint of anywhere between 30 and 60 riders.
The race’s opening act connects the country’s two largest cities. They are close enough to be linked by a proper-length ITT, but seeing as this is both the first stage and 2025 a road stage makes much more sense, and so that’s what we’re getting. It doesn’t have the elevation gain to be considered a mid-mountain stage, but this is still far from an easy opener.
Map and profile
Start
The first-ever major race on Albanian soil starts from Durrës, the country’s second city and main port. For the purpose of this project, it’s rather fortunate that the Giro has chosen Durrës for the first stage start, because to the 99% of you unfamiliar with Albanian history, I’m going to have go through a little bit of it to make sense of my city writeups and there really isn’t a better place to start than the city that was the most important in ancient times.
And no, unlike RCS, I am not going to be using the Italian names anywhere – I’m very glad I set that precedent for myself in the 2024 Tour analysis, because… well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Durrës was founded by Greek colonists as Epidamnus in 627 BC. It was already a prosperous port long before it became one of the first cities outside modern Italy to fall under Roman control in the late 3rd century BC. This turned out to be an enormous boon to the city, as the Romans chose it as the starting point of the Via Egnatia, which connected it to Constantinople. Together with the Via Appia and the short sea voyage from Brindisi to Durrës, which was rechristened as Dyrrachium, this was the main route from Roma to the east. This made it not just a key economic hub, but also of great strategic importance. Most notably, it was the site of the first major battle in Caesar’s civil war in 48 BC (Pompey won, but failed to land a decisive blow, he then pursued Caesar all the way to Pharsalus in Greece… the rest, as they say, is history). In the Byzantine era, Durrës remained significant as a key link between east and west, but decline was inevitable in the turmoil of the post-Roman world. Repeated conquests in the second half of the Middle Ages, when the Byzantines, Bulgarians, Normans, Venetians, Sicilians, Serbs and the Albanians themselves all held the city at least once, accelerated the decline. The final nail in the coffin were the decades when Dürres was the last Venetian holdout in an Albanian coastline otherwise entirely conquered by the Ottomans, and upon its fall in 1501 it became rather unimportant for the next centuries.
After dwindling to just 1000 inhabitants by the mid-19th century, Durrës finally rebounded in the final decades before Albanian independence in 1912. However, Albania was one of the weakest states in the region and with first the Balkans and soon thereafter all of Europe engulfed in war, Serbia, Bulgaria, Italy and Austria-Hungary all occupied at least part of the country for a time during the first post-Ottoman years. Durrës, which saw military action and damage on multiple occasions during this period, served as the capital for a time, until Tirana was established as such in 1920. After the First World War, a highly unstable Albania remained under simultaneous pressure from Greece, Yugoslavia and especially Italy (who occupied Durrës for a time – this is why the capital was moved), and only American diplomatic intervention preserved its independence. The Yugoslavs enabled the permanent ascension of the Zog (later King Zog I) in 1925, but his autocratic regime soon turned to now-Fascist Italy for support. While the influx of Italian money was of particular benefit to Durrës, which established itself as the main port and tourist destination in this period, political and economic support soon turned to dependence and exploitation. Zog I eventually attempted to put up resistance, but was unable to do so and thus it should come as no surprise that the eventual annexation in 1939 was swift. For Albania, therefore, World War II was characterised by forced Italianization at the hands of the fascists – hence why it totally isn’t problematic that RCS are calling Durrës Durazzo, especially not given that this Grande Partenza is taking place in the light of renewed rapprochement between Albania and an Italian government led by the direct successors of said fascists.
Oh, right, I’m not supposed to get too political on this forum. In any case, Italian control of Albania ended with the collapse of the Mussolini government in 1943, and while the Nazis propped him up as a puppet in Northern Italy, they took direct control of Albania. Occupation finally came to an end the year after, when a communist resistance force liberated the country. In spite of the main theatres of war being far away, three percent of the population did not survive these five brutal years. Initially, Yugoslavia gained significant control once more, but this period abruptly ended with Tito’s falling out with the USSR in 1948. Communist Albania was led for most of its existence by Enver Hoxha, a hardliner even by communist standards. Hoxha, the kind of guy who claimed Tito was an anti-Marxist, split from the Soviets over what he saw as the betrayal of Stalin’s legacy in 1956, and followed the exact same pattern with China in anger at Nixon’s visit to the country in 1972. In part because of his repeated alienation of just about everyone else, Hoxha was noted for his paranoia, and nothing exemplifies this as well as the 750000 bunkers his government famously built all over Albania. Needless to say, none of this helped the country, and by the time of his own death in 1985, Albania was both the poorest and the most isolated country in Europe, to say nothing of the severe repression he inflicted on his people. But hey, at least Hoxha got to claim his was the last true communist government in the world.
In spite of a more or less peaceful transition away from dictatorship, the post-communist era got off to a particularly bad start in Albania, with increasingly corrupt governments at best turning a blind eye and at worst covertly supporting pyramid schemes in which possibly more than half the population invested. Everything came crashing down in 1997 and the country largely fell into violent anarchy as a result. By the time UN forces had restored a semblance of order, an estimated 2000 people had been killed.
However, the 21st century has seen continuous improvement, and for all the troubled history, growing pains and myriad other issues, at least Albania has finally shed its decades-long status as the poorest country in Europe. Durrës itself, with its orientation towards trade and tourism, has benefited particularly well from the end of isolationism. And between the Roman amphitheatre and the early Byzantine fortifications (the legacy of Emperor Anastasius I, who was born in the city), it has plenty of surviving history to show off too.
(picture by Agonsta24 at Wikimedia Commons)
Route
Okay, that wound up being a lot less like my usual introduction and more of a Libertine in the Race Design Thread-esque dissertation than I’d anticipated. To those of you who stopped reading it halfway through: welcome back, I promise I’ll talk about cycling now.
The first third is entirely flat, initially heading south through the coastal plains and then turning east to head up the Shkumbin valley. This section contains both intermediate sprints, in Paper and on the outskirts of Elbasan, Albania’s fourth-largest city. As ever, even though both sprints are marked the same, the first one hands out points for the ciclamino jersey and the second for the Polti-Bardiani intermediate sprint classification. Rather than heading into the city proper, the route heads north here to climb out of the valley up the first KOM of this edition: Gracen. The first 10.7k of this climb formed the MTF of the 2023 Tour of Albania, won by Max Stedman. Its elevation gain is decent, but the gradients are quite unremarkable.
I would also like to point out that the URL for the image below reads 2025/03. Just in case you were wondering if there’s any good reason we didn’t get the full route until a week and a half before the race.
Even though this was the main road to Tirana prior to the opening of the motorway, the descent is actually technical in parts. The road to the capital goes through the low pass at Sauk, which is the location of the totally-not-a-conflict of interest time bonification sprint. Unlike in previous years, the bonification sprints hand out six, four and two seconds for the first three riders.
By the time the riders have made it to this sprint, they are well within the Tirana suburbs, but that doesn’t mean they’re about to finish yet. Because if there’s one thing RCS love this edition, it’s local circuits. On this stage, we do almost two full laps (the first lap is missing the first few hundred metres, as they join the route right after the finish line). The main feature is the KOM at Surrel, which is 4.9k at 5.5% if you exclude the initial false flat. All the difficulty is in the ramp after said false flat.
Finish
The descent looks twisty on the map, but isn’t particularly challenging. It ends at 4.3 kilometres from the line, where it turns to a false flat (1.4% on average) that lasts until inside the final kilometre. The final turn, at 500 metres from the line, takes the riders away from the Lanë river, past the Tirana Pyramid (the last and perhaps most famous of the communist era building projects) and onto the main boulevard. It looks like it drags uphill on Streetview, but thanks to Albania’s surprisingly good geoportal I was able to measure it and find that it averages a whopping 0.7%.
And now it’s time for something I’m very glad I didn’t have to do at the start of the post: talk about Tirana. It’s not that I have anything against the city, but rather that it plays no role in Albanian history until it became the capital almost by happenstance in 1920. Founded by the Ottomans in 1624, it had grown to about 10000 inhabitants prior to independence, but remained more of a provincial town in the shadow of older, larger cities like Shkodër, Vlorë and of course Durrës. So why exactly was it chosen as the capital city? As I mentioned in my long introduction, the Italians had seized Durrës and all the other main cities (if not also under occupation) were just as easily accessible from the sea. A temporary capital was therefore needed, and thanks to its central location and the existence of at least some buildings to house the government, Tirana got the nod. This arrangement was then made permanent in 1925, and only after that did the city really start to grow. Hence, modern Tirana is almost entirely less than a century old, a mixture of the heavily fascist-influenced original city plan, Hoxha-era highrise, postcommunist (re)development and often-illegal urban sprawl, together combining for a city with almost four times the population of any other Albanian city.
The entire final straight. They use the right half for the finish, then loop around Mother Teresa Square (in front of the polytechnical university in the background) and come down the left half to start the circuit. (picture by Radosław Botev at Wikimedia Commons)
What to expect?
Attacks on the final climb are inevitable, but chances are things come back together for a sprint of anywhere between 30 and 60 riders.
Last edited:
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