Lake Koman did not exist before 1986. Between 1979 and 1985 Albania's communist government raised a rock-fill dam at the village of Koman, the middle of three built along the Drin, and when the gates closed the river backed up 34 kilometres into its own limestone canyon, covering the valley floor, the farmland and the road along the riverbank. What it left behaves less like a reservoir than a fjord: green water roughly 400 metres across for much of its length, pinching at the narrows to little more than 50, with pale grey walls standing several hundred metres straight out of it. The road never came back. Villages that once sat above a river now sit above a lake with no way in or out except by boat, and the ferry that serves them is also how a traveller sees the canyon. The name here is older than the water — a hillfort on the ridge above the dam gave an entire early-medieval culture its name.
The road to the pier ends in a one-lane tunnel cut through the cliff, unlit; you come out of the dark facing black water, with the dock hard to the right. The crossing to Fierzë takes about two and a half hours, cars, villagers and sacks of shopping sharing one open deck, with stops at jetties where nothing waits but a footpath climbing into the trees. In spring, as snow comes off the Albanian Alps, water seeps out of the porous limestone and falls down the walls in thin white threads, and the lake turns its deepest green. Most people ride to the far end and go on into the Valbona valley; the Shala arm, which has no road either, is reached only in a smaller boat. The car ferry runs mid-April to early November; in winter a small passenger boat keeps the villages connected.