Stand at Rozafa Castle and you are standing on a hill where people have made decisions about who rules them for over four thousand years. Every empire that ever reached this corner of the Balkans came to Shkodër. Most of them eventually left.

The Illyrian tribe of the Labeatae founded a settlement here in the fourth century before the common era, on a strategic hill where Lake Shkodër drains into the Buna river. It became the capital of the Illyrian kingdom, minting its own coins and producing rulers whose names still echo: King Gentius held out here until 168 BC, when a Roman general named Anicius Gallus defeated him and absorbed the city into the empire.

Rome held it for centuries. Shkodër became a provincial capital, a Christian archdiocese, and eventually passed to Byzantium when the empire split. Medieval Serbian kings, Albanian lords, and Venetian merchants each took a turn. By the fifteenth century, the city sat directly in the path of the Ottoman advance.

In 1478, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Second arrived in person and laid siege with some ten heavy cannons cast on the spot, firing cannonballs weighing close to four hundred kilograms at the walls of Rozafa. The city held. Mehmed left his commanders to continue and the siege dragged through winter. Only famine and the fall of surrounding castles broke the defenders' will. In 1479 the citadel's garrison was permitted to leave unharmed. The Ottomans took an empty city.

Under Ottoman rule Shkodër became the economic heart of northern Albania, its craftsmen producing silk, arms and silver. The Bushati family governed it as a semi-autonomous pashaluk from 1757 until an Ottoman force finally broke Albanian resistance on 10 November 1831.

The nineteenth century brought newspapers, libraries, and a cultural awakening. The first Albanian-language publications printed in Albania came from Shkodër's presses. The Marubi family of photographers documented the Albanian liberation movement from studios here, leaving behind over a hundred and fifty thousand glass-plate negatives.

The Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913 brought a Montenegrin siege of seven months. More than ten thousand Montenegrin soldiers died before the city surrendered in April 1913. Montenegro was then compelled to hand Shkodër to the new state of Albania by the London Conference of Ambassadors.

The twentieth century piled occupation upon occupation: Montenegrin, Austro-Hungarian, French, Italian, and finally German forces all held the city at one point. Shkodër was the last Albanian city liberated from German control, on 29 November 1945.

What followed was, by some measures, the harshest chapter of all. The communist regime of Enver Hoxha demolished the ancient bazaar and the port on the Buna, erased centuries of trade, and filled the city's prisons with Catholics, intellectuals, and anyone who resisted. Shkodër held more political prisoners per head than almost anywhere in the country.

The communist regime fell in the early 1990s, and Shkodër was again at the centre of the democratic movement that ended it. The hill at Rozafa still stands above the lake, the cannonballs from Mehmed's siege still sit in the castle museum, and the city that outlasted Illyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, Ottomans, and communists alike carries on.