Albania
Light in the Shadows
[Hear it in the voices, breathe it in the air: Mount Vesuvius lives in Naples’ shadow, never the other way around.]
Lamps learn to listen, the walls grow eyes, neighbours turn to watchful statues: life under authoritarian regimes is a unique lived experience.
Few countries know this truth like Albania, the former communist isolate haunted by history’s long shadow.
Rozafa
Barely 40 years ago, I’d have been arrested for simply being in Albania. But there I was, perched on the ruins of Rozafa Castle overlooking the town of Shkoder, framed by rugged mountains, silky rivers and tangerine sunsets with Montenegro off in the distance.
A short, steep cycle out of town, Rozafa’s ethereal views are tangled up in Albania’s long history of occupation and resistance.
Built in 2000 BC, the citadel was converted into a military base by the Ottomans, who ruled over Albania from 1430-1912. Then, in 1939, two Albanian officer garrisoned at Rozafa Castle refused to observe the surrender to the invasion of fascist Italian forces, fighting until they ran out of ammunition. Italy’s Benito Mussolini controlled Albania until his regime collapsed in 1943 and Nazi Germany continued the occupation, using Rozafa as a strategic viewpoint.
By the end of World War Two, Albania had been occupied for 483 of the last 515 years, with the only interim period characterised by the geopolitical tensions of World War One. Enver Hoxha (pronounced Ho-sha), leader of the resistance movement and founder of the Albanian Communist Party in 1941, was the country’s natural successor after Albanian partisans forced the Nazis out in 1944.
Riding a wave of popular support built on generations of anti-imperialist sediment, Hoxha swept into the role of leader and patriarch.
As the sun began to dim the light on Lake Shkodra to a metallic purple, I descended from Rozafa into town, soon arriving face-to-face with the dictator - suspended in porcelain. That face of lethal bureaucratism, once celebrated in town squares and fearfully placed on mantlepieces, now sat on the shelf in one of Shkoder’s emerging tourist shops in the form of a tea-cup. A chapter in history, or a subtle scar on the land I was visiting?
All Our Tomorrows
“There should be no date of death on this marble stone,” Ramiz Alia tells the mourners. “There is just one date for Enver Hoxha, his date of birth.”[1]
Standing above the tomb of the man he had just replaced as leader of the communist party after 40 years of iron rule, Alia promised the endurance of a man, an idea and an apparatus from yesterday into tomorrow. What Alia could not have known, however, is just how many tomorrows there would be.
Rozafa’s ethereal views are tangled up in Albania’s long history of occupation and resistance.
It is believed that over 6,000 ‘enemies of the state’ were executed, 100,000 interned in concentration camps and 6,000 disappeared by the communist regime from 1945-1990 – what is considered to be the most brutal form of Stalinism that Europe has ever seen.
After a few hours in a 1980s Mercedes minivan with the profile of a printer, I arrive in Albania’s capital, Tirana, where the memories of those lost are concealed in monuments, museums and leftover projects of the communist era.
Once the fortified residential quarter of the party’s politburo, Bllocku is a Tirana’s vibrant and trendy centre lined with cafes, bars and memorials to seemingly distant days.
Closer to the centre of town, the House of Leaves Museum lays out the intricate depth of Hoxha’s apparatus of oppression while Bunk’Art 2 provides a physical window into life under a brutal, self-conscious communist dictatorship in the politburo’s former subterranean fortress.
Visiting Tirana, you can dip into the past as if it were no more than a page of history. For many Albanians, however, this treasure is elusive.
Although the communist party collapsed by 1992 under the weight of economic failure and communism falling across Eastern Europe, the blueprint for corruption, inequality and organised crime drawn out by four decades of dictatorship and poverty has extended up to the present day.
Communist officials faced little-to-no accountability for their crimes during the regime due to poorly designed transitional justice mechanisms. As a result, corruption remains an endemic challenge and the political sphere is polarised. Despite economic improvements in recent years, Albania’s poverty rate remains at 23.4%, according to the World Bank, which is above the European average.
While a dramatic rise in tourism has provided some relief, much of the revenue appears to flow upwards to private capital and organised crime syndicates which operate with impunity. This is summed up by the recent attempted acquisition of an Albanian island by the Kushner-Trump family.
For some, the weight of the present has understandably distorted the view of the past. “In the past, if you held your tongue you were safe,” said Mari Kitty Herapi, descendant of an ‘enemy of the nation.’ “These days you can scream, but no-one will hear you.”[2]
Into the Light
He hangs from necks and sings in curdled symphonies. He rings the bells and serenades the mountains from minarets. He is the Nene that crosses herself as the Mercedes winds along unpaved roads. He is the man who touches his chest as he cycles past the church. In a country in which He was pronounced dead, how can God swim so close to the surface?
Perhaps none of the fatalities committed by the communist regime were as profound as that dealt to faith – both religious and social. Religion was banned and borders were closed in 1967 and around a quarter of Albanians either collaborated with or was co-opted by the Sigurimi, the state’s secret police.
Visit Albania today, however, and small acts of faith, whose subtlety is conditioned by decades of self-censorship, permeate everyday interactions.
A blast of rain subsides and dazzling sun-rays cut through the glass roof of Tirana’s central market, printing geometric sheets of gold onto the shimmering tiles below. Back north, in Shkoder, vegetables, meat and honey pass hands in flimsy plastic bags in stalls outside the between communist-era flats and the football stadium.
Families filter into Orthodox churches as mosques harmonise in the distance.
Leaving the city, Tirana’s bus terminal forms a highly functional hub of chaos with a language of paper signs and hand signals, catapulting passengers and increasing numbers of backpackers across the country’s blemished skin.
Albania is a country that knows the iciness of the shadows, which is why it is the sheets of light that hook themselves into the mind.
MM