Albania
Once insular, now welcoming to travelers
Hello ~ I’m Scott and welcome to your 5-Minute Vacation for Nov. 5th. I share these snippets of our travels in the hope that my photos and stories will allow you to go on a vicarious vacation and “get away from it all,” if only for a moment. I appreciate you inviting me into your inbox today.
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Here’s the previous 5-Minute Vacation if you missed it.
Downtown Tirana. The heart reads, “You are happy! You are in Tirana.”
Recently we did something I never expected to do: we visited Albania.
After a hassle-free two-and-a-half-hour flight, we landed in Tirana, Albania’s capital and largest city. After passing through a very hi-tech, automated passport control gate and collecting our bags, we exited the terminal and found ourselves face-to-face with a KFC.
Later that evening in downtown Tirana, we ran across KFC’s local competition. If we had done a taste-off, I wonder which would’ve won?
Sandwiched on a sprawling plain between the Adriatic Sea and mountains, Tirana is due east from the city of Bari in Italy’s boot. Being close to the sea at this latitude, Tirana and the surrounding area have a Mediterranean climate, complete with heat and humidity in the summer, as we discovered during our late August visit. Thank goodness for all the AC (according to one of our guides, AC was introduced to Tirana in the ’90s).
Tirana seen from Dajti mountain.
One way to escape the heat and humidity is to go to the beach. Although we didn't visit any, some of Rosemary’s colleagues have been to Albania’s beaches and their consensus is that the beaches are lovely and inexpensive.
Another benefit of a Mediterranean climate is wine. We visited the Kokomani Vineyard outside Durrës, the port city just to Tirana’s west, where we had the pleasure of sampling one white and three reds.
On this sun-dappled veranda, we were treated to this feast while sampling their wines.
Our trip to the winery was one of two times we ventured outside of Tirana. Both times, we saw many (dozens, at least) fortifications dotting the countryside. When we commented on them, both guides said matter-of-factly, “Yeah, they’re all over.” As if there was nothing special/weird about that. According to Wikipedia, over 750,000 bunkers were built during the communist years (that’s an average of 5.7 bunkers per square kilometer). They are an omnipresent reminder of Albania’s 20th-century history.
A concrete pillbox on the road to Kokomani Vineyard.
While Albania’s history begins at least as far back as the Mesolithic era, it seemed to me that Albania today is dominated by its decades under communism. The Albania that emerged from the devastation of WW2 quickly became one of the most insular and mysterious states in the world. To try and understand those decades, we visited three places in Tirana that are dedicated to addressing communism’s legacy in Albania.
Skanderbeg Square, home to the National History Museum, was our first stop in trying to understand communism’s effect on Albania.
Skanderbeg Square, Tirana, Albania in October 1988. Image from Wikipedia, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Our first stop was the National History Museum. While the museum’s collection begins in the Paleolithic era, the Pavilion of the Communist Terror on the 2nd floor is the most powerful. This gallery has exhibits of the hardships and brutality Albanian’s endured and is so graphic that a guard is at the gallery entrance to prevent children from entering.
Our second stop was The House of Leaves, a.k.a The Museum of Secret Surveillance. This museum, in a building that was originally the first private obstetrics clinic in Albania and then commandeered by the Gestapo, become the headquarters of The Directorate of State Security, a.k.a. the Sigurimi. The exhibits are more detailed, but less graphic than those at the National History Museum. Most of the exhibits detail the techniques and tools the secret police used to spy on everyone. I was amazed at how much time and resources Albania devoted to spying on its people.
The third was Bunk’Art 1, a five-story bunker complex built inside of a mountain whose purpose was to allow Albania’s dictator Enver Hoxha and the political elite to survive any attack. Construction began in the ’70s and only halted after Hoxha died in 1985. The complex remained unknown to the general public until it became a museum and gallery complex in 2014. It’s rumored that a tunnel connects it to Hoxha’s house several miles away in downtown Tirana. However, the tunnel, if it exists, has yet to be discovered.
The concrete doors into the complex are thicker than Rosemary’s hand.
On the left is Hoxha’s office. To get a sense of how small this space is, I was standing in the doorway with my back against the wall when I made this photo. On the right is one of the many hallways in the complex. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia but I imagine that if I had to live in this complex, I would soon become claustrophobic.
Our second foray out of Tirana was to Lake Ohrid, a lake that straddles the border between Albania and North Macedonia.
Lake Ohrid is one of the oldest and deepest lakes in Europe. According to Wikipedia, it has a “unique aquatic ecosystem of worldwide importance” but tourism is the main industry today.
Another way to escape Tirana’s summer heat is to go to Lake Ohrid. Because it’s almost 2,000 ft higher in elevation than Tirana, it’s usually cooler and less humid than the city. According to the thermometer in our guide’s car, there was a 10°C difference between the two the day we visited.
On the road between Lake Ohrid and Tirana, we saw more concrete bunkers, including this one that was perched at the edge of a field and almost hidden by the hay bales.
Tourists and locals aren’t the only ones who have gone to Lake Ohrid to escape the summer heat. Both Josep Tito (Yugoslavia’s former dictator) and Enver Hoxha (Albania’s former dictator) had villas on the lake. Tito and Hoxha started on friendly terms but eventually, they fell out. The story goes that Tito threatened to stop water from Lake Ohrid from flowing to the Drin River, the river that powered the hydroelectric dams that supplied most of Albania’s power. Hoxha reportedly replied that if Tito did that, then he (Hoxha) would tunnel through the mountains and drain all the water from the lake (he was serious, supposedly he had his engineers begin planning for a tunnel). The lake was never dammed and the tunnel was never bored. I think we’ve all had less-than-friendly neighbors, but this spat was at an entirely different level.
Speaking of Enver Hoxha, this is house. It’s currently unoccupied and unused but if you were to try to get through the gate, or even put your hand over the fence, someone from security would arrive promptly. Or so our guide told us. Opposite the house is another KFC.
Hoxha’s vision of communism restricted ordinary citizen’s mobility. Because people couldn’t travel a lot, no public transport system was built and the road network was underdeveloped. Post-communism, the road system couldn’t handle the surge in the amount of cars. As a result, the traffic is terrible.
The traffic in downtown Tirana may be terrible but the traffic lights are cool. Check out how the green from the upper traffic light continues down the pole to the sidewalk. The horizontal blurs are vehicles traveling through the intersection. The vehicles are blurred because I had to use a relatively long shutter speed to make this photo.
There’s more, much more, to Tirana and Albania than the communist legacy, for example:
On the left, this amphitheater is a reminder of the Greek and Roman influence. On the right, the old market and minaret are reminders of the Muslim influence.
Even though I’ve exceeded the recommended length for an email, we have to finish with one more thing from the communist era. The Pyramid of Tirana (photo taken in 1996) was co-designed by Hoxha's daughter Pranvera Hoxha and debuted in 1988. It began as a museum dedicated to the legacy of her father but when communism collapsed in 1991, it became a conference center and exhibition hall. It has survived calls for demolition and today is an IT center for youth. Image from Wikipedia, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Today’s Travel Words
Hidden gem
We never dreamed that we could one day visit Albania and we certainly didn’t know what to expect. We found that Albania offered a wealth of experiences, beauty, and cultural richness; it’s a “hidden gem” that I’m glad we discovered. I hope that one day you have the opportunity to discover Albania, too.
Next time, we’ll return to a well-known gem, Italy. Until then ~
Tschüss!
PS ~ If you are new to my photography, you can see more at scottgilbertson.com.