About Saranda’s Martyrs’ Cemetery
A bit to the southeast of the center of Saranda, just off Rruga Skënderbeu, you can find a cemetery and memorial dedicated to the martyrs of World War II. Nowadays the cemetary is a bit squeezed in between the concrete buildings, but still has a free view over the Ionian Sea and the bay of Saranda.
On the top of the hill, overlooking the cemetery is memorial in the form of a tall white column. On the top of the column there is a large red star with six more smaller red stars, a symbol referring to the comunist times when the memorial and cemetery were built. In front of the column there used to be a statue of a female partisan with a gun and flag as well but the statue is no longer there today.
The cemetery is built on the slope of the hill with rows of tombs and a flight of stairs on each side. If you’ve been walking around town, you might even notice that some of the names on the tombs also have streets in Saranda named after them, like Telat Noga for example. On the bottom row of the cemetery there is also a large marble panel with about 150 names of partisans without a tomb, but died in the area or came from here and died elsewhere during the war.
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