The cab driver throwing up his arms and yelling “Va fancullo!” as he nearly rear-ended a car on our way out of the airport was an early sign we would be having encounters with Italy, spiritual and actual, here in Albania. My travel partner and I were charmed, at ease with the theatrics. After exchanges with the driver involved repeated assertions of “bene” and “sì”, accompanied by vigorous nodding, it became clear he was limited to these two words and expletives, a kind of Potemkin Italian. We doubled down on our Albanian. It would take five days to memorize “faleminderit” (“thank you”).
We were greeted by the promise of old-world luxury at “Le Mondial”, our hotel in Tirana. A lobby of soft lighting and wood paneling featured an ornate staircase which, in an unusual 19th-century flourish, was lined with cages full of twittering birds. More soothing décor up in the room. My friend sized it up. “Everything seems nice, but something’s off”. She glanced at scuffs on the furniture and cautiously parted the window curtain. It exposed a gravelly lot surrounded by squat stucco buildings and faded billboards. “It looks like Berlin meets New Delhi”.
If you have never travelled to the Balkans, you may experience this disorientation. With the necessary disclaimer that the region is diverse, there are “Western” points of reference but also the hallmarks of the race to economic development. New construction is fervent, not all of it thoughtful, while pockets of the landscape remain neglected, with roads unpaved and occasional open sewage. And everywhere, the naked aspiration to membership in the Union. All public buildings in Tirana bear both the national and EU flags; the license plates are EU format and the Euro is commonly accepted currency. Europeanness is not so much hoped for as manifested.
Tirana’s city center, anchored by Skanderbeg Square, is small and navigable enough that we were spared the blinkering instructions of Google Maps. Maybe it was the simple act of looking up, or the golden light streaming through maritime pines, or the pleasure of a Friday afternoon in early summer, or the Albanian tradition of “xhiro” – a daily leisurely stroll to meet friends and exchange gossip – but we were struck by how at ease the city was with itself. It wears its historical phases lightly, even with humor. Italian rationalist architecture coexists with the vast boulevards and squares of the Communist era, mosques with cathedrals, and Ottoman cobblestone with the dictator Enver Hoxha’s strange urban enclave, Blloku, now reclaimed and painted over in technicolor murals. Casually, an idyllic lake opened itself up to us at the top of a path in Tirana Park.
In Blloku, I climbed a gate covered in barbed wire to catch a glimpse of Hoxha’s villa. It was perverse how benign and non-descript it was, a suburban mid-century home with low pitched roof and stone accents. The man who imprisoned, tortured and executed thousands of his own people lived in the house from the Brady Bunch. I thought of the Popa family who took refuge in the Italian embassy to flee Hoxha’s repressive regime. They spent five years there. Their eventual airlift into Italy triggered a flood of Albanians to foreign embassies, putting an end to the dictatorship. The Popa’s, however, were considered an “annoyance” to Italian authorities and they died in poverty in Albania years later.
A three-hour taxi ride with Abdil took us to Ksamil, the southernmost point of the Albanian Riviera (“Bregu” to Albanians), twenty minutes from the border with Greece. Abdil’s English was poor but his musical selection spoke to who he was. 50 Cent’s greatest hits played on a loop so that I had the out-of-body experience of simultaneously being back home in New York in 2004 and, looking out at a pristine countryside untouched by civilization, let alone industrialization, in rural Albania one hundred or even one thousand years ago. We couldn’t see it over the rocky hills, but the smell of the sea filled the car on our approach.
Ksamil is in, all ways, under construction. Many buildings are incomplete or just completed and the village, erected in a place where evidently there had been nothing fifteen years ago, has a slapdash look. The community is trying to find its footing with a tourism it is extremely eager to attract. So many waiters told us they weren’t really waiters, barmen not really barmen, that I wondered if the surrounding rural population, its farmers, shepherds and mechanics, had been drafted en masse to accommodate this burgeoning industry. What Ksamil lacks in architectural charm is made up for by its crystalline waters and synchronicity with the elements. Flowering vines grow unrepressed out of concrete, a grilled fish from any of the menus, where you can skip over pizzas and pastas, is likely to be one of the best you’ve ever had – ditto a plate of fresh mussels from nearby Lake Butrint, teeming with them. In Butrint Archaeological Park, you’re not sure whether to be more delighted by the Greek amphitheater and Roman nymphaeum, or by butterflies, turtles and cormorants. Oddly, for all the straining to extract commercial benefit from this sliver of pretty coast, the pace in Ksamil is not frenetic. Every evening during a shower, I watched the sky turn to purple and listened to the call of the muezzin, seduced by the fantasy that we were the first foreigners in this little-known corner of the world.
We ended our stay inland in the fortified town of Gjirokaster, an Ottoman jewel. Lately, it has made its way onto tourist itineraries, filling its picturesque narrow streets with cafes and bars, the sorts of places where you could order an espresso martini with your burek. We saw many older residents settle under the shade of olive trees to embroider, crochet and make lace, confirming the town’s reputation for artisanship. Gjirokaster has always been mercantilist, life gravitating, as it were, around a compact warren of shops that constitute its traditional bazaar. The merchant’s spirit is more cunning now with the arrival of foreign tourist dollars. Original handicrafts mingle with mass-produced trinkets, though all are claimed as local – and though none of this can be discerned from the magnificent height of Gjirokaster’s castle, a sprawling, 12th-century complex overlooking the town and Dnipro Valley. I couldn’t help but think that Hoxha had never met a building he didn’t like to use for punitive purposes. Parts of the castle had been turned into a prison under his rule, a fact that seemed unfathomable when entering a former “cell”, which was nothing more than a dirt-floor room, so dark it took three iPhone flashlights to see a foot around us. I imagined how quickly the prisoners lost their minds.
My friend, never one to mince words, insisted we not spend our last dinner in a “tourist trap”, so to be safe we selected a restaurant outside Gjirokaster’s walls. The walk from the center was short but slightly perilous. Had she not held my arm while I distractedly spoke on the phone, I would have plunged seven feet down through a hole in the pavement. The restaurant was on a dim residential street and we appeared to be the only customers. We hesitantly asked if it would be possible to sit outside and no sooner had we said the word, a table was carried out for us. Our fifteen-year-old waitress, Anesa, the proprietor’s daughter, was more efficient than most adults and had a confident command of English. She turned shy only when revealing her hands, recently manicured with long, fashionable fingernails that clashed with her casual clothes. She had done them for her school dance the next day, and because all her friends had. “I don’t really like them”, she confessed. “I love to draw and I can’t hold my colored pencils with these”. She appeared nervous about her final exams the week after the dance.
I looked around at where we were. It could have been anywhere. But unmistakable was the hum of a family rotating around the house, chatting in the kitchen and carrying out food as it emerged from their oven. A little boy ran out suddenly and let himself into the driver’s seat of an old Mercedes parked close to us. He sat there by himself, face illuminated by his phone, and grinned wildly when we looked his way. This is where I hope it can go without saying that what we ate – traditional dishes like stuffed peppers, meatballs and baked farmer’s cheese – was wonderful, straight from Anesa’s grandmother’s hands to our plates. Gratitude didn’t quite seem adequate for an evening of such serene intimacy. We parted wishing Anesa good luck on her exams.
Back at the airport: Bari for 30 Euros. Milano, Bologna and Venezia for 40 Euros. Pisa for 52. Big billboards all around us advertised destinations Albanians could zip to easily and cheaply in their “brother country” across that thin stretch of Adriatic Sea. As we left, I marveled at the difference a few decades could make. From the absolute prohibition of movement in the Communist years to the ability of present-day Albanians to book a low-cost carrier and fly virtually anywhere on a whim. Truly, could there be anything more European than that?
