Touring Tirana

Discovering Tirana

By Jim Cohee

Quick -- Name the country that has a majority Muslim population, a working democracy, has been supporting the Iraq War, and named a major street in its capital city for George W. Bush. Need a hint? This southernmost Balkan state features western archaeological treasures (I have walked by walls that date to the time of Homer…), Mediterranean beach resorts (…and had coffee on a hotel balcony overlooking the sparkling Ionian Sea and Greek Isle of Corfu), and mountainous terrain that easily competes with the beauty and challenging hikes of the Austrian Alps.

Albania, one of the least explored countries in Europe – a crossroads where east met west during the Ottoman Empire.

In the 1990s, President Clinton’s decision to help Kosovo (80% of whose population is Albanian) earned the United States a grateful and implacable ally. You won’t have to explain American foreign policy here or the weakening dollar. The hardest question you’ll take is why the U.S. Consulate won’t permit more Albanian students to study in the US.

In Tirana, I stayed at the Hotel Palma on Sami Frasheri Street in the Blloku (called “the Block”), the district reserved in Albania’s communist past over 20 years ago for police-state functionaries. Today, the Block is lined with flowering linden trees and busy streets abuzz with shops, restaurants and cafes. A buzzing center of capitalism that must surely have Supreme Comrade Enver Hoxha (say “Hodja”), the country’s communist party chief for forty years, rolling in his grave.

Begin your walk at the top of Deshmoret e Kombit, at Skanderbeg Square—for everything begins at Skanderbeg Square in Albania’s capital city. In fact, Albania itself begins here. The square’s equestrian statue celebrates the one essential man in Albanian history, Gjorji Kastrioti, called Skanderbeg, Albania’s founding father and most famous warrior, a fifteenth century military genius who cobbled a state from warring Illyrian tribes and kept the armies of the Ottoman Empire at bay for an astonishing twenty-five years. He is the avatar of resistance, the heart-breaking theme of Albanian history, for Albanian identity has survived the depredations of wondering tribes and imperial powers for 2500 years. A mind-numbing list of would-be conquerors have been repelled from this place. Greeks and Romans and Goths and Slavs; the Byzantine Church; the Sunnis of the Ottoman Empire have all been here. And in the twentieth century Albania overcame a failed democracy, a self-appointed kingship, Italian fascist, Nazi, and Communist dictatorships before a self-sustaining democracy took hold. The survival of Albanian national aspirations after centuries of occupation is one of the miracles of modern European history. So it’s no surprise that Skanderbeg’s military standard, a two-headed eagle on a field of red, is now the national flag.

Skanderbeg’s equestrian statue stands at the northern end of Bulevardi Deshmoret e Kombit. Your hike is down this wide, picturesque street, past Italian fascist and Soviet Communist architecture, past the city’s best parks and theaters, across its tree-lined river, the Lana, to the Archaeological Museum at Tirana University, home to antiquities that seem to have been donated by the veterans of Troy. Albanian history is written on every brick of this extraordinary street.

First, cross the northern edge of Skanderbeg Square to the National Historical Museum—plunging through traffic that runs by like a stream of spawning salmon. Stay close to the natives when you cross these streets! You’ll survive it and wonder how. On the bottom floor of the museum you’ll find samples from the beginning of Illyrian culture (of which Albania is a part): ancient bronze-age shards and tools, then Greco-Roman artifacts and a few fascinating maps. Look for a map of the old Roman Road, Via Ignatia—one of the major roads of southern Europe two thousand years ago. It ran from Byzantium (now Istanbul) to the Albanian port town of Durres; one could ferry the Adriatic Sea from Durres to Italy. Christianity found Rome by this road (with a little help from the Appian Way), for one of its travelers was St. Paul.

In the museum, look for “The Goddess of Butrint,” a stunningly beautiful piece of statuary found in an archaeological zone on Albania’s southern border. (Her lovely head may be that of Apollo.) Other floors cover more recent centuries of Albanian history, particularly the influence of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled here for five hundred years. On the top floor you’ll find a sobering memorial to the twentieth century victims of the Supreme Comrade, a display that will reduce your appetite for Maoism considerably.

Down to the street you go, glancing left to the eighteenth century Et’hem Bey Mosque on the square—the faithful are still called to prayer here, though the place is headed for museum status. Barn swallows dive its minarets. (Go at night, when the mosque is dramatically lit.) You, however, turn right toward The National Theater for Children on Rruga Cameria. I got lucky when I was there. I walked through open doors, met English-speaking actor Denard Xhifferi, and was promptly invited to sit in the orchestra and watch the rehearsal in progress. It’s a wonderful little theater, with child-sized loges and a small proscenium-arch stage. The actors were dressed as fantastic eggs, whose shells cracked as they moved, and they were obviously enjoying themselves. An actress opened the web-thin curtain by taking hold of its edge and dancing in it. Director Klaudia Hila was putting her actors through their paces in a moral drama about the importance of natural foods. The play was set to open June 1, Albania’s “Day for Children.”

Walk a single block east now on Rruga Luigj Gurakuqi to glance at the Monument to the Unknown Partisan. If you think Socialist statuary is a pile of left-radical cartoons, look again. This street fighter, rising for combat with raised fist and rifle, is memorably strong.

Now back to Deshmoret e Kombit. You’ll notice, walking south towards Tirana University (about a mile off), somber Italian-fascist ministerial buildings, ochre and pink and red, featuring shuttered and pedimented windows, pilasters with extravagant capitals, swags, and grim legionnaires in relief. These buildings went up in the thirties. They speak to fascist pomp and to Mussolini’s dreams of empire—he annexed Albania in 1939.

In fact Deshmoret e Kombit was designed, in part, to accommodate fascist military parades. The buildings now are what they were, government ministry offices, though they are now in dialog with a very different architecture facing them on their western flank—massive concrete communist-era apartment buildings. They are the image of state ideology, yet look a little makeshift, too, with their mushrooming satellite dishes, exposed pipe, the Klee-drawing wiring (there are too many exposed wires on those buildings), and laundry hanging from balcony rails.

To the idea of state architecture, the Albanians have brought a certain Mediterranean warmth: the bird cages and flower pots and striped awnings, the aroma of rice flavored with olive oil, and the sound of village dance music.

And there’s a yet newer voice in this tumult of incompatible architectural plans—the voice of Socialist Party chief Edi Rama, Tirana’s current mayor. After the fall of communism here in the 90s, Rama made the town Europe’s biggest art school. He had fresh paint delivered to the town’s building-owners, and he let them go.

The conceptual art that resulted is not hard to decrypt. Bright walls in many colors—in checks, in streams, in wall-size swatches that leave some of these buildings looking like giant game pieces—all taunt the city’s gray communist past. These buildings want to dance in the streets. And the tumult will get noisier in a few years—the Architectural Studio, based in Paris, has just won the design competition for a revamped city center. Ten office buildings shaped as rhomboids and other geometrical patterns (abstracts of Easter Island grave markers) will flank Deshmoret e Kombit. Let’s-try-something-different is the operative idea here.

Next up on Deshmoret is The Pyramid, the so-called International Center of Culture. It seems to function as a conference facility, though it was smeared with graffiti and boarded up when I was there. The building, a monument to the career of Enver Hoxha, was designed by Hoxha’s daughter (still a working architect in Tirana), a woman who has given much of her precious time over the years to building monuments to the Supreme Comrade. (Her fellow countrymen have spent a good deal of time pulling them down.) The Pyramid survives, though it is, like the Hoxha regime, the wrong idea on a massive scale. It’s no pyramid—it has a vertical back—and it looks like her father’s collapsed heart.

On to a brighter venue, one of my favorite places in Tirana, Youth Park. This city park with restaurant and pool and expansive grounds is the gathering place for the entire town. Every age and class are at their ease here. Go at evening and enjoy the promenades, the children’s soccer games, the backgammon players, the gossipy matrons, the wacky street-vendors and their ware: pink plastic tennis rackets, helium-filled dog balloons, and so much more. In this beautiful park, young mothers teach their infants to walk and smother them with kisses, and oh yeah, you’ll see tourists, too. You will watch here, and you will be watched.

When I was last enjoying this festival of Albanian life, across town the Albanian national championship soccer game was being played. Dinamo (sponsored by the Ministry of the Interior) had just defeated Partizani (Ministry of Defense), and Dinamo fans were streaming by in cars, standing through roof windows, wearing the team colors, honking and waving flags. The boom boxes were on; the kids were at their games; the whole park was a festival of life.

Across from Youth Park is the National Art Gallery. You’ll find contemporary exhibits on the ground floor, and an historical review of Albanian painting and sculpture above. The Socialist-Realist paintings on the second floor are particularly fascinating. Find “The Fitter” (1979) by Petro Kokushta, a painter born in 1945 at the conclusion of the Second World War and the beginning of the Albanian Communist Party regime. In the painting a worker on an elevated beam waves his red flag before a bright industrial backdrop. His confident laugh greets the worker’s paradise. Now look for “The Evening” (1989) by Agron Bregu, born in 1960 when that murderous Communist regime began to seal its borders. A family group featuring a mother with her head in her arms, her husband in retreat with his book, and her children with no apparent relation to each other and no affect. Failed hopes are felt in every brush stroke.

Out to the street now and one last visit—the weakly lit Archaeological Museum, which stands on the grounds of Tirana University at Mother Teresa Square. I walked alone in this dusty place, and I was thrilled by it. Here are 2700-year-old bead necklaces, amphorae the size of coffee cups, theatrical masks, capitals of ancient pillars brought down to eye level—they’re touchable—three-inch-tall figurines drawn from Greco-Roman public life—the warrior, the statesman, the actor, the athlete—a bronze safety pin, silver spoons (whose bowls are shaped like shells), and pale fluorescent bulbs blinked over a warrior’s helmet that might have graced the head of Achilles.

Back on the street you’ll see school children buying food from vendors through school yard gates, past newspaper kiosks, the one cow standing in the bed of the pickup truck—followed by the BMW limo—the busy coffee houses with thick syrupy Turkish coffee, and the students on the street with T-shirt mottos, “Rock and Roll Saves Lives” and “Turn up the Volume.” The beautiful, the weird, the old and renaissant forces have made a strange alliance here. And that could be prophetic. This place has a frontier-town energy to it. It’s hoppin’. It’s growing. And the volume is going up.

Getting There: I took Malev (wwm.malev.hu) to Budapest for a weekend of touring of Pest coffee houses—highly recommended—then on south to Tirana.

British Airways will get you there through London, Malev through Budapest. Austrian Airways, through Vienna. There are no direct flights to Tirana from the United States.

Booking your tour: Kutrubes Travel in Boston (www.kutrubestravel.com), 617 426 5668, can set you up for many interesting Balkan tours. They are responsible for my hike in Teth National Park in northern Albania, a steep, lofty, and magnificent place that left me wondering if I had somehow hiked into the Austrian Alps.

Getting in: A current passport is required for American citizens, but no visa.

The Cost: Albanian currency is denominated in leks, each worth about a penny. One can live high here, but for the most part, this Balkan state can beat western European prices any day. That hole-in-the-wall pizza joint up the street served me a whole pizza for $5.00.

Getting around: You won’t have any trouble flying into Albania, and Albania’s small Mother Teresa airport is efficiently managed. There’s a ten-Euro fee to enter. Once in town, you’ll find Tirana has a decent bus system (you can ride across town for 20 cents). You can rent cars from Avis (www.avis.com) and Hertz (www.hertz.com) and Europcar (www.europcar.com). Tirana has plenty of taxis and you can get anywhere in town for a flat 3 dollars (rides in those taxis will remind you of white-water rafting trips). Forget the trains—they’re too slow.

Where to stay: I stayed at two hotels in Tirana, both of which I recommend. The Mondial (hotelmondial@hotelmondial.com.al) is a little removed from the center of town, but features a pool, two bars and a nice restaurant; and Hotel Palma (info@hotel-palma.com), a modest, clean, less expensive place than Mondial, but closer to the center of things. The average price was about $130 a night.

Where to Eat: The town has a wide-ranging Mediterranean appetite. It won’t take you long to find restaurants featuring Italian, German, Greek, and native cuisine. Entrees from $10 to $20. Pizza for a family of four, $8.00; falafel from a street vendor, $1.50.

Something to write home about: The bunkers (700,000 of them), built by Communist Party Chief Enver Hoxha and never used. They look like Darth Vader helmets.

Best National Park: Butrint, Albania’s first national park. Butrint is an ancient town built on an inlet in Lake Butrint near the Greek border. Samples of 2500 years of western architecture stand shoulder-to-shoulder here. A magnificent place.

Best Hike: Underdeveloped and strikingly beautiful Tethi National Park in the northern Albanian Alps. Think lofty limestone peaks, mountain villages of stone houses, clear mountain streams, and beech forests as thick as wool.

Best Guide Book: Tirana Cityspots, Thomas Cook Publishing, by Tim Clancy. It can be ordered from Amazon at:

amazon.co.uk/Tirana-CitySpots/…

For more information: albaniatourism.com.

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Great article Jim Cohee... I love the style and the very descriptive itinerary you propose here... Bravissimo!

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Your trip last year sounds fascinating.

Can you tell me more about Kutrubes Travel? We are thinking of taking a tour of the Balkans with them in the Spring.

Thank you, for any information you might be able to give us.