Light and Shade in Albania by Mira Skalkottas

I flew into Tirana on a Friday afternoon in July 2017, not expecting to be hailed. In what cities of the world do passport officials smile? Not just smile, but break into a toothy grin? That was my entrée into Albania. A few days here felt like opening a time capsule in black and white.

The woman at the counter squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, smiling widely. Seeing my name in my passport, she cried, “Zamira!” The rest of the rapid-fire sentence came in Albanian, a language that exists on its own branch of the Indo-European tree. I told her that I didn’t speak Albanian. The smile fell. I shrugged my shoulders with regret, trying to convey that I really did wish I spoke the language.

“I thought you were Albanian.”

“I know, because of my name.” But it’s not just that. Being half-Greek, I look like them.

Then she told me that the name means “very nice” in Albanian. I almost said, “Like the country?” but didn’t want her to think I was being too familiar, corny. Anyway, I didn’t know yet. I was flying in fairly blind, taking an alternative route to my main destination. All I knew about Albania was based on a dorm-mate I had in college with very pale skin and very black hair that kept falling in his face and that he kept pushing back. When he first found out I was Greek, he said, “We’re neighbors!”

In Greece, I had met quite a few; they were the largest immigrant group in Greece. They used to be a common part of the landscape, though that has changed apparently in recent years, with more opting to immigrate to northern Europe and many assimilating completely. The following summer, I also met an Albanian artist named Erjon Nazeraj who had an exhibit at the Oratorio de San Quirino in Parma, Italy that explored ideas around migration and home and used gold thermal blankets in dramatic ways. With black curls and a straight nose, he looked so classically Greek; it made me wonder.

The woman at passport control, formal and officious now, punched an entry stamp into my passport, and I moved on. Waiting for my luggage now that didn’t show, I scanned the area and saw a couple of strapping men with lanyards. They pointed to the Lost and Found office. Inside was a very tall Little Prince. He had silvery hair, flinty blue eyes, and a sharp nose. He took my information methodically, then stood up and looked out across three luggage carousels as if he had laser vision.

“Is that it?”

It was. My bag had fallen off the furthest belt into a space behind the conveyor and the wall, so it was impossible to see at my height. I thanked the Little Prince, and he said, “Not at all.”

The taxi wended through green fields and cornfields and haystacks and cows and mountains. It was beautiful like a postcard from another century.

We came into Blloku, Albanian for The Block, the neighborhood where the communist-era elite once resided. My hotel was futuristic, with white, beige, and olive curves. Very 5th Element, my sister said. Young girls manned the reception desk. They mentioned the Spa and Wellness Center called Nobis. With my card, I let myself into my room, where I found more beige and white curves, Apple TV, and Netflix. Spiffy.

I went to Nobis that evening, running on a treadmill that faced windows lining a pool. They gave me two towels and a key to lock up my personal items. So far, everything was smooth, practical, efficient. But while I was running, the lights in the gym went off. The treadmill kept working, which was very thoughtful. I looked around and saw some members had pulled out their phone torches to see their weight machines. Ah, that was what I had forgotten! My guidebook had recommended bringing a little flashlight. Apparently, these power outages are much less common but still happen.

The next morning, I went for a walk in the Park on the Artificial Lake, which I believe is its official name, to the south of the city center. It was warm and peaceful, with meandering paths, bikers, picnickers, and joggers. I could have spent hours in the park’s umbrage and pointillist light, but I needed to see the city. I retraced my steps and went the other way.

Overhead were buildings in orange and red and purple. There is something sweet about this, as if Tirana were a child’s drawing of a city come to life. This was a deliberate choice on the part of the city’s mayor, to freshen up the drab communist-era buildings. The effect is both naïve and daring, the popsicle colors of the old buildings married with new high-rises shooting up in cubes and rhomboids.

The motif continued when I took a drive outside Tirana the next day, into countryside dotted with purple and magenta houses. All this color seemed to reflect a hunger for self-expression, for individualism, like the joy of dressing up after not having done so for a long time.

Coming into the center, I passed Enver Hoxha’s midcentury modern house, which was gated, in decay, a fairytale place, an ogre’s home, as if put under a spell for many years. Did it make too light of the past, the forty years he ruled the country with an iron fist, to see his dwelling as something both ominous and magical, like the underground world in Pan’s Labyrinth? The historian Bernd Fischer described Hoxha’s rule as a collage of fantasies and paranoia, surreal and secretive. This chiaroscuro quality pervaded my brief passage in this country, a place both childlike and containing brutal aspects within the folds of its history, bleak but enviously untouched, completely its own.

I went to The House of Leaves next and walked through, enthralled and quiet. This former beating heart of espionage, the central nervous system for the government’s surveillance program, for its Sigurimi, or secret police, still evokes a hushed and illicit feeling today, as if visitors are trespassing, seeing what they shouldn’t. But it also seems quaint too, the bogeyman that is just a coat in a closet when the light’s turned on.

As I walked next along the Rruga Sami Frashëri, named after the legendary Albanian National Awakening figure, I was fascinated by the mix of patterns in clothing. I hadn’t seen this since my time in Russia: a skirt in one pattern, a top in another, and I wondered if there was something inherent to communism and its aftershocks that inspired this.

Beyond the House of Leaves was the Church of the Metamorphosis posing as a mosque, or vice versa. Modeled after Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, its hybrid nature seemed fitting for this Muslim-Christian country. Then there was an actual mosque that is one of the major sights of Tirana, the Et’hem Bey Mosque, a beautiful structure dating from the 18th century that looks from the inside like it has been hennaed for a wedding night, painted by an Italian and an Albanian working together. The strap of my sandals broke in my hands just as I was slipping them off to step inside. They were Italian and expensive, so I swore I would wear them till they fell off my feet, and they did.

In the central square now with my broken sandal: every country needs a national hero, and this one is a giant, medieval knight on horseback, Skanderbeg, revered for resisting the Ottomans. The flag before him, the giant bronze statue itself, and the rock pedestal it stands on are all a dramatic foil to the flat roofs and linear lines of the Soviet-era structures and the socialist realist mural on the façade of the National Historical Museum behind it. I felt a frozen quality in this 40,000 square meter space, even in the intense summer heat, an amberous effect, that of a country that stewed in its own history without much change for 50 years.

There was a de Chirico quality in this space. Sun-bleached buildings, long dark shadows, lots of emptiness, a few people far apart. The national flag, a double black eagle on a red background, blew in the empty plaza that I crossed two bridges to reach, over the Lana Stream. Later I read that in the countryside around Tirana, there are bats and wolves and wild boar.

Fountains came out of the 129, 600 tiles made out of natural stones from all over Albania in the square, cooling it, and a handful of children were running through the water and splashing each other. The sound of burbling water was a frequent accent in the city, an element common to Islamic architecture. There was a smokiness to the air too, as if there was a barbecue somewhere, and I remembered that the city lies in a valley at the base of Mount Dajti to the east, perhaps trapping air pollution.

Tirana International Hotel also holds court in Skanderbeg Square, apparently the place to stay in the Cold War days, and that still manages to look remarkably alluring, even if now other 5-star hotels, glittering icons of cities around the world, abound: the Plaza, the Sheraton, the Rogner.

The temperature crept up from 31 to 38 with a real feel of 40 degrees Celsius. There seemed to be no ice anywhere but lots of ice cream. I stopped on my way back for a freshly squeezed but tepid juice of beets, carrots, and apples at a sidewalk stand called Noki.

Strong light and shade continued to play as I walked, and I passed someone wearing a T-shirt that said, “Black is light.” Next up on my walk was the pyramid, an eerie mashup of a communist leader’s final resting place and an ancient Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb. It looked like something futuristic conjured up in the past. I walked up one graffiti-covered side, which produced a slight zero-gravity effect, as if I were walking on a wall.

Circling back, I passed the chunk of the Berlin Wall gifted to Tirana, standing like an abstract sculpture, next to a communist-era bunker. Berlin and Tirana were fellow historic city-victims of closures and isolationism. But there was no place like Albania, a blank space on maps for half a century, completely isolated from the rest of the world. It was not just a closed country. Tirana was a closed city within a closed country. People did not move within the country. And within this city, an entire block was off-limits, reserved for the party elite, not to be entered. And under the city, hundreds of bunkers to save the communist elite in case of a nuclear or chemical weapons attack.

There are still vestiges of this centralized control and paranoia. I couldn’t sit outside the National Bank of Albania on its cool wall in the shade, I found out. I was shooed away by an officer. I couldn’t enter the Pyramid from the south side. I couldn’t book a restaurant or buy a bus ticket on a Monday. There were still blocks, limitations. Sites that evoked very real terror in the past are now tourist attractions. The House of Leaves, the Pyramid, Enver Hoxha’s residence, the Bunk’Art 1 and Bunk’Art 2 museums, all have a mien of coolness that can be uncomfortable.

Here George W. Bush is memorialized in both street and statue form, strange and incongruous to see, but he was the only American president to visit Albania. There are vast boulevards and spaces that remain from their fascist heyday, and that lie open, unashamed, exposed. The one now named after martyrs was once Mussolini’s Way. On this wide street built for motorcades and tanks, the green, red, and yellow signals light up all along the poles.

I came back the other way to Mother Teresa Square, near the university, and again found wide spaces with large staircases, graffiti splashed across any surface. Girls dressed up, girls on bikes, boys in jeans, boys with haircuts, boys riding bikes—the square was theirs.

Did I gain knowledge of the country beyond Tirana, among the wettest and sunniest in Europe? This place where my name is not uncommon? This country of UNESCO World Heritage sites, of a city of a thousand windows, of blue-eye talismans? This country that eats its own tail from corruption? What is the money LEK worth? It was impossible in four days to get a grasp on the value of thousands of LEK. The smallest coin denomination is 10. Imagine having a $10 coin.

Albania was Illyria in ancient times; the Albanian language is a descendant of the ancient Illyrian tongue. According to Greek mythology, the helmeted king Illyrius is said to be the eponymous ancestor of all the peoples across the Adriatic. To my ears, the language had Slavic sounds but an Italian cadence.

I had lunch at a place called Spaghetti Western, a caricature of the Old West. Next I went to a recommended place, S.A.L.T., for dinner, a restaurant that could have been in any world metropolis. The whole time I was there though, I never once saw a wine list. They just brought me a glass of something Italian or Montenegrin or Albanian.

I booked a food tour for the next day, and I was the only customer, so it turned into a private tour. We went to the outdoor market and to a traditional restaurant called Oda, where I talked to the owner about different local types of raki, tasting the mulberry and black walnut versions, both sumptuous.

We drove to the coast, not to Durres, a popular seaside destination, but to the Cape of Rodon, where we had fish and cucumber salad at an outdoor taverna overlooking the undulating cobalt of the Adriatic Sea. On the return trip we stopped at a farm for another al fresco meal of farm-made cheese, bread, fruit and raki. The farm girl spoke little English and, even with the guide translating, spoke very little. She had dark eyes and long, thick lashes. Our drive back took us off-road, and we literally drove through bushes to get back to the highway.

We ended the day by going to Mullixhiu for what they called the “Metamorphosis” tasting menu. The silverware was hiding in drawers in the tables. The wifi password was hand-stitched on a little sachet of oregano in the breadbasket. We ate sweetbreads and marinated mulberries, potato soup with cornbread croutons, baby goat, zucchini foam with zucchini flowers and slivers of plum, and topped it off with sweet buttermilk shots. The mineral water was divine, and a shared dessert came on a plate broken in half.

The next day I had a little time to shop in the Italian boutiques, then I caught a cab to the bus station to head to Greece, my driver lamenting I had only spent three full days here. All night we bussed through the southern length of Albania as the sun went down. Miles and miles of cornfields in a marmalade light slipped by. Then it became dark, and we were still hours from the Greek border.

(After waiting two hours to cross the border, we skirted Ioannina and sped south to Patras. I slept at the Byzantino Hotel, going to bed at five in the morning and waking at noon the next day to catch the ferry to Zakynthos to see Greek family, then to Kefalonia to see Greek friends, leaving the place I was just passing through to return to the home where I never fully belonged.)