As Albania’s capital gains wealth and confidence unthinkable a generation ago, a traveler is shown the way to stories hidden below its newly glistening facade.
“But you know, he wasn’t happy,” said Elton, lighting his third cigarette, as rain hammered on the roof of the Tirana Opera House coffee shop. Three Roma kids, dirty, confident, swaggering pugnaciously, were harassing nearby tables as our empty espresso glasses cooled in the January air. “He did photography workshops here, every year for 20 years. And now he says it’s no, good, that this is not a third-world city anymore.”
Elton smiled wryly, fully aware of the irony, his angular face framed in a well-maintained mustache and goatee. As a tour guide, fixer, stringer for international media, and now a well-connected advocate for Albanian tourism and the leader of Albanian Trip, the newfound wealth and stability of his country are things he has fought and prayed for. And yet, a certain mystique, a wild, rule-less exoticism, was fading. Together, we went in search of its last remnants.
***
Lighting candles at the Resurrection of Christ Orthodox Cathedral, Tirana.
Taking the two lit candles in one hand and holding my one-year-old daughter in the other, I navigated carefully to the candlestand at the corner of the narthex. As we entered, a priest was performing a blessing on a baby not much younger than mine. After reciting in a forceful voice over the pram, he grasped the infant as if it were a drunk being kicked out of a bar, and strode with it toward the back of the church. A door swung open before him. A glittering room of paintings and gold shimmered, tantalizingly, in the distance.
The new Resurrection of Christ Orthodox Cathedral on Rruga Ibrahim Rugova was inaugurated in 2012. Religion was brutally quashed in communist times (Albania declared itself the world’s first atheist state in 1967) and has been rediscovered tentatively. Islam, the dominant faith, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity have all been the impositions of foreigners, generally complied with for convenience rather than zealously adopted. Elton greeted my daughter with a sweetly superstitious “mashallah,” and he lit a candle for her here. I carried her in my arms, as she had long since rejected the pram, which Elton graciously offered to push as we left the church and went to visit the bust of Joseph Stalin
We ducked off the path, through a small park, and were soon peering over a low concrete wall into a well-maintained private garden. A guard stood nearby and looked at us quizzically. Elton spoke with him cheerily for a moment, as I tried to make out the dictator on the other side of the wall. These large, bronze-colored busts of Stalin and Lenin live ordinarily at the national museum. But the museum is being renovated. So here they are. In the garden of a state guest house for visiting dignitaries. Just visible, especially if you’re a little taller than average, and someone tells you where to look.
We went to look for Stalin. We found him.
It’s surprising how heavy a one-year-old can be in your arms after a long day of walking, but the ground here was too rough for a pram. We trod carefully on the slippery, muddy path up to Varoshi Castle. Built somewhere around the 5th century AD by the soldiers of empires that no longer exist, it lies just 15 kilometers outside of Tirana, but the traffic battle of the drive and the abrupt change from urban sprawl to wild, mountainous hinterland made it feel like we’d ventured thousands of miles into the unknown.
On the highway, the traffic was bad, as it always is. (‘Ka trafik’ was the constant refrain of anyone who was late to meet with me during my time in the city, which was everyone, except Elton). Cars tried to jostle and skip the queue to turn off the highway. Elton wound down his window and lectured them on civility. I caught just a short phrase of his harangues to a woman in a car that had tried to push in to our left in Google Translate, ‘In the name of citizenship!’
I stepped gingerly over spent cartridges; hunters had reclaimed this territory recently, and the restaurant down the hill was rumoured to have once served bear meat. About two-thirds of the way up, I was growing unsure of my step, and the wind was rising. It started to rain. “You know what?” Elton said. I relaxed, expecting him to say the conditions weren’t right and we should turn back. “I say we commit,” he said.
We committed. And it was worth it. The view at the top took in Tirana, a concentration of concrete in the distance. We saw the Adriatic Sea. We saw the hills roll into Montenegro. They saw the clouds, impervious to borders, rushing in from all sides.
Heading down a different route, we saw a lady, in a tumble-down bungalow just below the castle, holding a baby in a sheepskin jumper who looked about the same size as the child in my arms. Elton greeted them. They noticed my baby, and we all smiled. I got tongue-tied mixing up my Albanian hellos and thank yous as they invited us for coffee and juice. Their family name was simply Kalaja, Albanian for castle. Their baby was seven months old. The mother and grandmother were there alone.
As we sipped our coffee, the grandmother asked Elton about the new benches the government had just installed around the ruins of the castle above their house. Maybe he could talk to someone in the government about getting her a job cleaning the benches when the tourists come? Elton said he’d try. After a ritual of protest, they let him leave a generous sum of cash for the coffees. Before we left, the babies touched hands, staring into each other’s eyes with an infant intensity. “We’re looking for a wife for him,” the grandmother said as we left.
***
A horse guards the Albanian flag near the center of Vlora.
Before coming to Tirana, we’d spend a month in Vlora, south on the Ionian coast. The town can be thought of in two halves. The beautiful half, where the new esplanade, the lungomare, is built out like a brochure with a stone path along the sea, and the dirty half, where stray dogs roam the muddy sands of the beaches and rubbish scuttles along the puddles on the streets.
I became fascinated with how rubbish was treated here. In what looked like a nice neighborhood, high up in the center, I was walking by as an old woman fastidiously swept the street in front of her large iron gate. She was munching on a candybar of some kind as she did so. When she was done sweeping, she flung the wrapper of the bar down the street; it landed in front of the neighbor’s gate.
Homes did not appear to have municipal rubbish bins. Instead, large skips are placed, seemingly at random, on various streets. I never saw them emptied, but designated Roma men and women seemed to attend to them, each with their own bin to focus on, sorting through the bags for bottles to recycle. I snapped the occasional photo.
After our visit to Stalin and Lenin, Elton took us to an older part of the capital. “This is Tirona, not Tirana, he said.” He showed me the communist-era apartment block where he had grown up and still lives with his wife and two children. Aside from the color and life of laundry billowing from many windows, it could have been an apartment block in Poland or East Germany.
“As a kid, I would play here,” he said. “And we would watch the tourists when they came. I would get so upset when I’d see them taking pictures of the rubbish bins.” He said. I felt bad.
***
People rest at the top of the Tirana Pyramid.
It was hubris rendered in concrete, a monument to the ego and callosity of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s communist-era dictator. When he died, it was to become a museum honoring his thought. And then communism fell, and as the debate on what to do with it raged, the 21-meter-high cone fell into disrepair. They say junkies and homeless people lurked inside. When I first saw it in 2019, it stood decaying, abandoned, like a shuttered mall on the outskirts of some middle-America town.
In 2023, the Pyramid of Tirana was rescued from decay and transformed into a youth and technology centre. Today, it is a bright, clean public space covered with colourful square modules as if a giant child had upended a box of Lego on it, surrounded by cafés and workshops. You can climb to the top and see views across the city and the snow-capped mountains that rise beyond. Below, the Lana River flows through the city.
“When I was a boy in school,” Elton said, “We would all come hang out here, every day.” He pointed out the staircase at the foot of a pyramid, a friend had ridden a motorcycle down to impress a girl.
“You know, on the day he died,” said Elton, referring to the dictator who had kept Albania isolated, paranoid, and poor for forty years, “I cried.”
“What?”
“Because I wanted to meet him, man! I wanted to give him a flower.”
“A flower?”
“If you did good in school. You’d be invited to bring him a flower. And I worked so hard. And then when he died, it felt like it was all for nothing.”
Hozha’s pyramid is clean. Polished. Rebranded. It stands near the centre of a newly energized city. But it’s still there, bulging out from the ground, like the roots of some ancient tree shoving through a new footpath.
“My kids are 9 and 13 now,” Elton said. “When I grew up, we were happy, but we had nothing. Now,” he said, looking at my daughter, back in her pram, “my kids will have the same opportunities as yours.”
