Category: Tirana

I had nearly three hours to spare before my flight, thanks to the efficient security process and border control at Tirana Airport, giving me a chance to visit the airport lounge. I was pleased to see that it was relatively quiet and there was plenty of seating available. Note that not only has he got the country’s main square named after him, he also has this lounge, I wonder which Skanderbeg would be most pleased about.

Some of the food and drink options, it’s fair to say that the range was extensive.

I was glad the person in front asked where the cups were for the coffee machine, it transpired they’re in the machine. It’s a long time since I’ve experienced a coffee machine which uses plastic cups and they come out extremely hot which adds some jeopardy to the whole arrangement, it’s good to need to use reflexes whilst collecting a drink.

The food and drink I had, with lots of fresh food alongside the pastries and baked goods. There was one beer and numerous different Fantas, which combined to surprise and delight. For the sake of completeness, I should mention that the beer was the Peja Pilsner from Birra Peja, a brewery from Kosovo, and it was clean, crisp and unexciting.

The staff in the lounge were friendly, efficient and very much on top of the cleanliness and customer service. The wifi worked, although they had a quite a reliance on low seating and I would have personally preferred some more higher seating, but that’s hardly much of an issue. I liked the availability of power points, the variety of food and the laid-back nature of the lounge. A very positive location to spend time in before the flight.

The Skanderbeg Monument is the proud centrepiece of Skanderbeg Square, a solid bronze reminder that Albania once had a national hero who wasn’t afraid of a bit of a fight. Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg (1405-1468) was a fifteenth century nobleman who ditched the Ottomans after they’d trained him and instead spent decades leading a resistance movement against them. For that, he gets to be put on a horse in Tirana as the nation’s hero and he was also widely respected amongst western nations at the time for helping to slow down the Ottoman expansion into Europe.

The monument itself went up in 1968, marking the 500th anniversary of Skanderbeg’s death. He’s shown on horseback, mid-stride, looking suitably heroic, wearing full armour and clutching a sword. There’s no mistaking the message that this is Albania’s ultimate national symbol, the man who stood up to an empire and inspired a sense of independence that Albanians still cling to today.

The rather hard to read memorial stone by the monument. Of course, because this is Albania, there’s also a bit of irony as the monument was erected during the communist period, when national pride was carefully curated by the regime. Skanderbeg was recast as the people’s freedom fighter rather than the nobleman he actually was, but his importance wasn’t lessened. Enver Hoxha, the corrupt communist leader, ensured that a statue of him was erected as the centrepiece of the square after he died, although that was torn down when communism fell apart. There’s an interesting story about where that statue ended up….

Skanderbeg Square is the beating heart of Tirana, though it feels more like the lungs on a quiet day, expansive, calm and just a little surreal. It’s named after Albania’s national hero, Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg, the 15th-century warrior who spent his life resisting the Ottoman Empire. His statue, naturally, takes centre stage, and it’s one of those heroic bronze figures that makes you feel slightly inadequate about how you’ve been spending your time. More on this statue in the next post though.

The square itself is enormous and it’s been redesigned in recent years with big, open stone spaces and a few splashes of greenery. It has the slightly odd quality of being both monumental and oddly minimal, which I think is part of its charm, especially now they’ve booted the cars out of it during the recent redevelopment. It’s ultimately a huge space with a lot of nothing going on at the centre. The history of this square started in 1925 when Armando Brasini was handed the task of shaping the new and shiny Albanian capital. Brasini, an Italian architect with a flair for the dramatic, came up with a grand Neo-Renaissance vision and his work was later continued by Florestano Di Fausto, who refined the Neo-Renaissance theme with what could be described as articulate angular solutions. Then came 1939 and the Italian invasion of Albania, and, as often happens when new regimes arrive, so did a new architect. Gherardo Bosio stepped in with a fresh master plan, tweaking the original designs to suit the occupiers’ tastes.

The mosaic at the National History Museum is called “The Albanians” (Shqiptarët) and it dominates the façade. It was created in 1981, during the height of the communist era, and is essentially a giant socialist-realist postcard in mosaic form. The mosaic had started to fall into disrepair, but in 2023 the restored version was unveiled which was partly funded by the European Union. There were calls for it to be removed, but this was a part of history that it was decided to preserve.

It’s a curious architectural cocktail as it’s Ottoman, fascist-era Italian, Soviet-inspired communist and modern Albanian, all happily coexisting in one giant open space. It shouldn’t work, but I think that it does, mostly because Tirana has decided to stop apologising for its past and just embrace the whole lot. The yellow building in the middle is the Tirana International Hotel and the old looking building to the right of that is the Downtown One Tower. Mostly hidden by the trees on the right is the National Opera House.

On the left is the Bank of Albania building, which was constructed in the 1930s, and in the centre of the photo is a skyscraper currently under construction.

The square is really also the unofficial stage for whatever Tirana decides to celebrate, protest or showcase. It’s a larger space than I had anticipated and there could be a little more seating and shady areas, but it’s all quite glorious and an architectural jumble which comes together quite nicely.

This is certainly noticeable and it’s the dome of a petrol station. Perhaps a curious example of Albania’s love for bold, slightly eccentric architecture and it makes it stand out against the otherwise ordinary backdrop of roads and trees. I did wonder whether it was fulfilling some higher cosmic purpose, but it’s just sheltering fuel pumps. It’s part practical, part playful and entirely memorable. I liked it……

This was something of an intriguing artwork to walk past and it’s Kafka by Lumturi Blloshmi (1944-2020), created in 2009. She was an Albanian artist who was stuck working for a while under the suppression of the communist regime, but later on in her career she focused on artworks that related to the human skull. This artwork is made out of resin with hundreds of the cigarette ends which are attached to it, trying to emphasise the transience of life and the dangers of pollution. Unfortunately, she died on Covid in 2020 and she had been deaf since the age of five, so she had to contest against political repression, the limitations of the art world being mostly male and a lack of hearing. She sounds like really something of a fascinating character. There’s more information about her life at https://secondaryarchive.org/artists/lumturi-blloshmi/.

Hidden away in the once-exclusive Blloku district of Tirana where the political elite once lived is Vila 31, the former home of the dictator Enver Hoxha (1908-1985) sits there looking quite unassuming. Constructed between 1972 and 1973, it was designed to be modern yet suitably imposing, the kind of place where a dictator could pretend to be modest while secretly enjoying the perks of power. There was a private cinema, a basement swimming pool and even a secret tunnel to an underground bunker as nothing screams ‘I trust the people’ quite like a hidden escape route under your own living room. Although a lot of this he blamed on foreigners, whilst Albania suffered financially, Hoxha told his population that the west as so jealous of Albania’s wealth that they might invade at any time to share in the prosperity. This ridiculous lie is perhaps why Hoxha didn’t let any Albanian travel outside of the country, it all has rather North Korea vibes to it.

This entire neighbourhood was once sealed off from ordinary Albanians and only the party elite could live here, and mere mortals weren’t even allowed to walk through it. Hoxha and his family lived surrounded by books, some of them on subjects he happily banned everyone else from reading. He also spent vast sums of the country’s money on importing fashionable European interiors, whilst bankrupting the country and mocking foreign design.

When Hoxha died in 1985 and the regime collapsed a few years later, the villa became a strange sort of relic. It wasn’t demolished, because no one quite knew what to do with it, but it also wasn’t turned into a museum or shrine. For years it sat there behind drawn curtains, an awkward reminder of the past while the rest of the neighbourhood filled with lively cafes and bars. Indeed, opposite the property is a KFC, the first in Albania, which I felt the need to pop into in order to cool down. The photos are evidence of just how bloody hot it was in Tirana when I was there….

And as for now, it’s been reborn as an artist residency. The marble floors and gloomy halls that once hosted political plotting now welcome painters, writers and filmmakers. Instead of propaganda speeches, there are poetry readings and instead of whispered paranoia, there are film screenings. So a house that was once a symbol of control and isolation has become a space for creativity and free expression. A former dictator’s stronghold now full of people doing exactly what he spent decades suppressing, Hoxha would absolutely hate it and we can all drink craft beer to that thought.

This is what the Pyramid of Tirana looked like in 1996 and it had been opened in 1988 as the Enver Hoxha Museum, the inept communist leader of Albania who trashed the country’s economy and banned the entire population from travelling overseas. The now disgraced Hoxha was widely detested and as soon as communism fell the museum closed, despite it being the most expensive building constructed in the country. During the 1999 Kosovo War, it was used as a base by NATO and it was also used as a conference centre.

There was a great deal of confusion about what to do with the structure, with some people wanting it to be demolished, but there were many others who wanted it repurposed. So, in 2023, that’s what they did, they repurposed it and put steps up so that people could walk up it. This was a little bit of a throwback to the past when local kids used to climb up it and then slide down, which wasn’t quite what the authorities wanted.

Here it is today, with the interior being a little under-used, although there are cafes and some charitable institutions use the facilities.

The views from the top.

It was probably a little too hot to be climbing all these steps if I’m being honest. Climbing the steps seems popular with locals and visitors, with Tirana being increasingly visited by tourists. All this freedom would have horrified Enver Hoxha, who was perhaps rather fortunate to have died from natural causes before communism collapsed, as otherwise he would have joined his wife, Nexhmije Hoxha, in prison. The only museum to Hoxha in the city today is that which tells the story of his totalitarian rule where people lived in fear.