What the ground has actually been doing lately, from the EMSC catalogue — with the fault story behind it, the old roofs that make it matter here, and the official channels.
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Southern Albania shakes often. Most of it is too small to feel, but when something does rattle the windows there is no single page that says what it was. This one lists what has actually been recorded near Gjirokastër lately, and where the official word comes from.
Strongest in this window
M4.5
61 km southeast of Gjirokastër · Not reported ·
27 earthquakes of magnitude M2.5 or larger within 160 km of town in the last 30 days.
| Magnitude | Where | Depth | Shaking | When |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| M2.6 | 109 km north | 15 km deep | Not reported | |
| M2.7 | 110 km north | 15 km deep | Not reported | |
| M2.5 | 131 km north | 15 km deep | Not reported | |
| M3.9 | 111 km north | 13 km deep | Not reported | |
| M3.2 | 68 km southeast | 0 km deep | Not reported | |
| M4.5 | 61 km southeast | 10 km deep | Not reported | |
| M2.5 | 135 km northeast | 15 km deep | Not reported | |
| M2.7 | 117 km north | 10 km deep | Not reported | |
| M2.8 | 63 km southeast | 0 km deep | Not reported | |
| M3.4 | 159 km southeast | 10 km deep | Not reported | |
| M2.7 | 78 km southeast | 18 km deep | Not reported | |
| M3.0 | 69 km southeast | 0 km deep | Not reported |
This page is not an earthquake warning
The Adriatic–Ionian region Gjirokastër sits in is, in the words of the ADRISEISMIC project the municipality itself takes part in, "the highest risk earthquake area in Europe" — and the reason it gives is not only the size of the earthquakes but the density of people and heritage in their way. That is a standing condition of the place, not a recent development: the town has been built and rebuilt on shaking ground for centuries.
Most of what appears in the list below is small and was felt by nobody. The events that matter here tend to come from the Ionian coast to the west, the Greek border country to the south around Ioannina, and the Ohrid–Korçë belt to the north-east. Distance and depth matter as much as magnitude: a shallow magnitude 3 nearby is more noticeable than a magnitude 4 a hundred kilometres away.
The magnitude 6.4 earthquake of 26 November 2019, which the USGS locates 15 km west-south-west of Mamurras in north-west Albania, was felt across the country and reset national attention on how buildings are built and maintained. The two things that make this town vulnerable were already well known: the old stone-slab roofs, which the regional heritage directorate has warned are collapsing under their own weight in wet weather, and the 1970s large-panel apartment blocks in the lower town.
If your house is a protected stone house and you can see cracking, sagging or slipped slabs, that is a repair question for the heritage office rather than an emergency line — the town's heritage-permit page explains who approves work and who helps pay for it.
Checked 1 August at 23:34. Earthquake data from EMSC (European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC-CSEM), open data). Magnitude, depth and felt intensity are revised as analysis improves, and very fresh quakes can take minutes to appear.