DURRËS (Albanese Durazzo). - An ancient Illyrian city (Dyrrachi), with an attached Greek Corinthian-Corcyrean colony (Epidaunon), among the first conquests in Illyria (229 B.C.) by the Romans, who restored to it its original name (Dyrrachion) and made it their most important Adriatic port. Having thus become a notable city of Greek-Latin language, it was the metropolis of the province of New Epirus (later the theme of Dyrrachion) from 314 A.D. onward. Almost never touched by the barbarians, it maintained under the Byzantines, the Angevins, the local dynasts (Topia) and the Venetians (1392-1501) its ancient splendor, later lost almost completely during the long Turkish domination (1501-1912). Capital of the Albanian State (1913-14), it is now a provincial capital.
There is reason to believe that Christianity took root in the province and even more readily in the capital from the 1st century onward. But from the 4th century onward its bishops, always metropolitans of a province dependent on the vicariate of Thessalonica and rich in suffragans, are frequently present in the documentation of the councils; there are reports of a well-organized religious life and of numerous temples and monasteries. Although the city was bilingual, the liturgical language was Greek; but from the 11th century an Italian colony is present with its own Latin clergy, and from 1204 begins the series of Latin archbishops which would be uninterrupted from 1392 onward, while that of the Greek metropolitans also continued. The network of suffragans of the Greek province was more extensive (Croia, Arbano, Scampa, Candavia, Licnido, Apollonia, Billide, Amantia, Aulona, etc.) than that of the Latin one (Alessio, Croia, Arbano, Benda, Stefanense, Prisca), limited to the North and East of the metropolis, and with moreover two sees (Alessio and Arbano) claimed by Antivari. At present, moreover, Alessio having passed to Scutari and the others having been suppressed, D. is a Latin archiepiscopal see without suffragans; as a see of the Greek rite, it is united to Tirana, aeguo iure, as head of the national Albanian autocephalous Orthodox church. D. was not as stable in orthodoxy as the other northern and central Albanian bishoprics, having suffered infiltrations of Acacianism (D. was the birthplace of the emperor Anastasius), of the schism of the Three Chapters, of iconoclasm, and later having always wavered between Rome and Constantinople, naturally the community of the Latin rite leaning toward the former and that of the Greek rite toward the latter. Its geographical position, therefore, and its singular bilingualism and bi-ritualism make D. and the province a true and proper frontier region between the East and the West, whose history is among the most characteristic.
Bibliography
Giuseppe Valentini