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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Impressions
of Albania We arrived at Mother Teresa Airport in the early evening – although just outside the capital, Tirana, it was totally deserted apart from a small booth still open to swap our £s for lek. The eleven of us on the trip discovered we’d all come to Albania because “we’d been everywhere else”(!) and wanted to discover the main points of interest in this mysterious country which, till only a few decades ago, was closed to foreigners. The group consisted of seven intrepid English travellers, two Americans, one Welsh woman and one Scot. We checked into our 4-star hotel in the city centre, to discover what became the norm of our two-week stay – that despite Albanians’ best efforts, not everything can be in perfect working order. Turn on your bedside lamp and fuse all the lights on that floor. Watch the needle on the hot-water boiler hover dangerously at red, as the container itself swings precariously by one wire from the ceiling. Oh well, if it blows up, at least it’s in the bathroom, not above the bed... Discover that the wash-basin in the spanking-new ladies’ toilet has a large hole in the middle of it (and it’s not the plug-hole). Hotel owners can’t get replacements or anyone to fix defective equipment without difficulty. Albania has been fought over through the ages by Illyrians, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans, overrun during the Second World War, then run by communists under the notorious Enver Hoxha, before achieving independence in 1990. This is reflected in the wonderful variety of architecture, painting and other crafts to be found in all of its towns. The problem is to get access to it all – will the museum, church or mosque on our horizon actually be open? – but more of that later... Most of our sightseeing in Tirana was to be on the last day of our trip, but before heading for the coast we drove up to view the enormous white statue of Mother Albania at the Martyrs’ Cemetery, an imposing and sobering sight. We then proceeded to Durrës in a “very comfortable minibus”, our transport for the duration. Tour leader Julia told us that very many minibuses in Albania are unsavoury rust-buckets driven by men who frequently swear at their passengers, but as our driver Sokol had bought his van himself, he took great pride in its condition, drove with care and was courteous to its ‘inhabitants’. What luck to hire him! Durrës has a Roman amphitheatre which we visited in searing heat, taking refuge in the vaults underneath. On the way out, we noticed the freshly painted-out two-tier pricing system - non-Albanians had been charged double what locals paid until the previous week, but now that has been abolished as a preliminary step towards the country applying for membership of the EU. Beside the amphitheatre stretch the Roman city ramparts, one tower of which has been turned into a café. That’s where we’d to start on the sign language, although it was a gentle introduction, as most serving staff do understand bits of English and German. (When we got into the interior of the country, we were on our own.) Albanian is an Indo-European language, hence related to Latin, Greek etc, but it’s totally on its own in a unique linguistic branch. Hence it’s a fiendishly difficult language for outsiders, even those who know a few languages already. It’s fun to decipher on paper - you can see words cognate with vocabulary from Turkish, Norwegian, Russian and German to mention but a few. Plus there are picturesque words like qershor, the month of the cherries i.e. June (German Kirsche). And how about shitet, the Albanian for “for sale”, seen all over the country in house windows and on the back of cars? Enough linguistic rambling! Our next stop was at Elbasan, in the mountains on the direct route to Macedonia. Inside the massive city walls, built by the Romans and the Ottomans we visited the King’s Mosque and the Orthodox Church of St. Mary, the first of many religious establishments admired during our tour. All of them were full of carvings, paintings and icons, the beauty and value of which took your breath away. Museums in the Western world would be happy to house just one or two of these items, suitably protected and secured under glass. Here they hung on the walls or were laid out on a shelf, open to the elements and to passing opportunists. Previous régimes in Albania weren’t interested in relics of the past, and it’s only now that they’re trying to promote tourism that they’ve become aware of their neglect. The priest in charge of St. Mary’s spoke to us for over 45 minutes – it got somewhat tedious towards the end – stating his enormous pride in ‘his’ treasures, and then insisted on a group photograph with himself in the centre. So he must have a mini rogues’ gallery of the very few tourist groups he has met. Some day, 50 years hence, in a fading photo-album… We then drove eastwards to spend two days in neighbouring Macedonia based in the town of Ohrid on the lake of the same name. The difference between the two countries was instantly apparent. After driving through beautiful wild scenery punctuated by run-down villages where the inhabitants patently lived with little money, across the border the natives of Ohrid could have been those of any Western European lakeside town. The pedestrianised shopping area was hotching with people out socialising and spending their cash, and there was a large choice of non-essential goods for sale. That wasn’t the case in Albania. The churches and other places of interest along the lakeside were interesting to visit – but off to Albania again! We crossed back into it near the point where it borders on Greece and drove along the mountain plateau separating the two. That’s where we saw the most bunkers. In fact there are over 700,000 of these concrete structures, sunk into the ground everywhere, with a couple of slits for soldiers with their guns to observe from, constructed during communism, especially under the dictator Enver Hoxha. They’re everywhere – in towns, on hillsides, in caves down near the beaches, in fields of grain. All over Albania you feel like you could be being watched. These pillboxes look like mushrooms with beady evil eyes observing your every move! They’re out of use now, but you still get the feeling… As it’s too difficult to destroy them, they remain in situ. A few enterprising folk have converted them into grain-stores or even into small cafés, but in general, they just lie empty, staring balefully at passing traffic. Korça in south-east Albania was the next base for exploration. We saw many things of interest there, from ancient churches and mosques to the ultra-modern beer factory. A small group of children ran after our minibus as it climbed up to St Mary’s church (another one!) in the village of Mborje on the outskirts of Korça and sat patiently outside it while we examined the beautiful frescoes of sinners suffering horrible trials on their way to hell. They’re badly in need of restoration, mouldering away on the damp walls until some funds are forthcoming. At a table at the front door old men were playing backgammon and ignoring us foreigners, but the children wanted to try out their crumbs of English on us. Shy and innocent, to me, (not exactly a child-lover…), they were a refreshing change from the troops of scrounging urchins who besiege tourists in well-known places of interest in Peru or the Middle East. It was obviously the first time this lot had posed for a camera or seen the instant results on screen – what fits of giggles all round! Next afternoon the beer factory was our port of call. Like the winery visited another day, it had been set up by private enterprise, the owner having studied the methods in Western Europe and then imported all the machinery from the best sources there. Most of us agreed to go to it out of a sense of diplomacy – after all, beer manufacturing is more or less the same worldwide. But it was worth it for what ensued. During our guided tour, a woman turned up who looked as if she could have been a debutante at Buckingham Palace in the 1950s – silk dress, high heels, swanky perm and full make-up. She turned out to be the reporter for the local newspaper, desperate to fill its pages with our impressions of the main local industry. Luckily two of our group were beer-connoisseurs, so Bill from the USA and Gwyneth from Wales came up trumps and told her that the product stood up to comparison with German beers and she left, a job well done. We appeared in the paper the following day, complete with photo and long report. The narration had been doctored to fit in with what Albanians were supposed to read – we had demanded to see the factory and had invaded it full steam ahead, declaring the beer to be “the best we’d ever tasted anywhere in the world”. The page was translated for us by our resigned but amused Albanian tour-guide Aleks, whose command of English was faultless. (And I verified it myself with a dictionary as a piece of evening entertainment.) On to Gjirokastra, birthplace of Enver Hoxha, whose splendid family home has been turned into the Ethnographic Museum, full of 19th century artefacts, followed by a walk up the steep cobbled streets lined with traditional houses to the Citadel. As the city centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the architecture is protected and altering façades is illegal. Till recently the inner Citadel was a political prison and viewing its interior was quite horrifying. Escape would have been impossible. On the ramparts various groups were preparing for the local folk festival, held every four years. It turned out that Bill was a talented dancer, swinging a leg in a line-up of Gjirokastrian men wearing the fustanella commonly associated with neighbouring Greece – a wonderful sight, as some of them obviously hadn’t donned this garb for a while and were having difficulty controlling it. Then back to the minibus parked a short distance downhill. Negotiating the cobbles, ubiquitous in old Albanian towns, it is evident that they were extremely practical in their day – try attacking the enemy whilst slithering on these in wet weather. After a hair-raising trip down to the coast in the gathering twilight, punctuated by an emergency stop on a zigzag cliff-top bend to accommodate two cows having an evening saunter on the main road, we reached the resort of Saranda at the southern end of the Ionian Riviera. This was our base for visiting Butrint, located on the mainland facing Corfu. For decades, archaeologists could only gaze at Butrint through telescopes, imagining the historical ruins buried under the thick vegetation. On a par with Ephesus for size and splendour, Butrint was a Roman/Greek city, surrounded by protective walls and including magnificent amphitheatre, basilica, acropolis, bath-house with heating system. Still largely unknown outside Albania, it is slowly being excavated. At present the extensive mosaics are covered in a layer of sand to protect them from the weather, so we could take photographs of this, to label ‘mosaics buried under here’. Also hidden, but making their presence known, were fierce mosquitoes, leaving half-crown-size lumps on us foreign bodies – they need to make the most of this unusual treat. As we proceeded round Albania, we only met two small groups of tourists and a couple of independent backpackers. Go now, before the hordes discover the treasures to be found there! Driving from Saranda along the woodlands beside the Ionian Riviera, we stopped to look at the Ali Pasha Fortress, on a promontory commanding a clear view of any potential attackers. It dates back to the 19th century, when the local ruler took over northern Greece and southern Albania. However, the most striking aspect was the shell- and bullet-marked, burnt-out barracks on the approach to the fortress, bringing home to visitors the impact of recent conflicts. Some of these buildings are now used to store grain and to dry out sage. The mosquitoes sped us on our way northwards to Vlora, which has several mosques of different styles close to the focal point of Flag Square. On a high marble plinth is the huge bronze Independence Monument, constructed in the striking style favoured by the Socialist Realists to commemorate the founding of Albania in 1912. Health and safety neurosis hasn’t reached this country. I almost plunged off the plinth 12 feet to the pavement below, having assumed that there would be steps all round the plinth or some kind of protective barrier. Wrong! It’s every man for himself, and severe injury would have meant being flown to another country for treatment, as Albanian hospitals don’t have the expertise to guarantee reliable assistance. Continuing up the coast, the next stop was at Apollonia, a Corinthian city on a hill overlooking a wide plain. To date, only 10% of the site has been excavated due to previous lack of interest, plus current financial constraints. Melting in the heat and devoured by starving mosquitoes, we were shown round the acropolis, amphitheatre, temples and archways. We might have been getting a little ‘cultured out’ at this point in the holiday, but we were then revived at our next port of call, the Church of St. Mary beside the monastery at Ardenica. (Originality isn’t evident in the naming of churches in Albania…) After viewing the magnificent frescoes and photographing the cool cloisters, we ‘bumped into’ the only beggar we met in a fortnight, a wee old woman dressed in black, who just stood and smiled at us. No outstretched hand or plaintive words, but someone must have tipped her off that wealthy tourists were around. She went away with some loose change, but she couldn’t have made a fortune out of foreigners, as so few ever pass by. Apart from that, have you ever reached the end of a trip and discovered that you’d 9/10ths of your spending money still in your wallet? There is nothing to buy in Albania – no tourist tat, not many postcards, and finding stamps was like meeting a polar bear in the Sahara. At one post office we came across, they couldn’t sell stamps because the employee responsible for that counter had failed to turn up. I won’t complain about queues in British post-offices again – at least you can purchase what you’ve waited for! Before returning to Tirana, we spent a day in Berat, a historic town on the Osumi river. On the evening of our arrival we rushed up the steep cobbled streets before closing time to the Ethnographic Museum, formerly a traditional house with storage facilities on the ground floor, family living area on the first floor and, at the top of the building, the guests’ room (men only), with the women’s gallery up a hidden staircase in a corner. Negotiating the cobbles on the way down to our hotel was a challenge – a cobble-less Albania would be a bonus… On discovering that there was no TV (an important tool for anyone trying to learn the language) in the room I’d been allocated, a polite request saw me transferred to different quarters, which, the manager informed me, was where visiting dignitaries slept. Behind the door of the vast outer room was a narrow bed for the guard, and in the inner room was a huge bed over which hung an ornate crystal chandelier. Luckily, one of the 24 light-bulbs in it was working. So in the dim light, I was able to get my evening fix of Albanian news bulletin, the main item being the slaughter in Durrës of a GP, his wife and children, apparently in retaliation for some perceived insult years ago. Blood feuds are still not uncommon in Albania. The next day we watched turkeys grazing in the graveyard next to a mosque we been promised access to. The caretaker couldn’t be got hold of – why bother to come to work for a handful of tourists? Never mind, we went on to what turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip, a viewing of the sufi temple. The baba (religious leader) himself, resplendent in long white robes trimmed with red, treated us to a most interesting discourse on the beliefs of Bektashism, a sect of the sufi order of Islam. The interior of the teqe (temple) was simple, painted in cool green with portraits of the previous babas lined up along the walls, but judging by the quality of the sparse furnishings, this teqe wasn’t short of rich benefactors. Our experience of Tirana on the day spent there before our late flight home wasn’t what the tour leader had planned. It was sloshing down with rain, the ideal opportunity to visit the National Historical Museum. It was normal opening hours, and the officials knew we were coming, but there was a snag – the director had gone on holiday, and nobody else had the keys. The hapless car park and office staff ran around like headless chickens, but their phone-calls were to no avail. I felt sorry for their embarrassment. We were disappointed but resigned, as many public places in Albania had turned out to be locked. They are anxious to promote tourism, but they haven’t quite grasped the idea of commitment to promises… The nearby Dajti Hotel used to be where the elite stayed when in Tirana, plus the few foreign dignitaries invited to Albania. It’s derelict now, but open to the public. What a strange experience to wander long unlit corridors and look into once-opulent suites, now only occupied by the ghosts of the past. The service areas on each corridor were full to the gunwales with discarded files in brown folders, whole roomfuls of them. Attempting to find out what secrets they held – they looked like government correspondence - I picked up one, but I’d barely begun to read when I was assailed from behind by the hugest hulk of a bouncer dressed in black. Foreign languages were banned in Albania till recently, so nobody can communicate with tourists, but this team of security men bucked the trend – their English vocabulary was most explicit. Big Brother was certainly watching in the Dajti! It was just a small taste of what Albania must have been like a couple of decades ago, but enough for me. The Dajti Hotel is named after the mountain of that name which overlooks Tirana. Later that day we went up in the spanking new cable car to the revolving restaurant at the top. This new leisure feature was inaugurated in 2005, using the latest Austrian technology. The cost of the trip was such that few Albanians can actually afford it, and the only other people in sight were a small group of businessmen finishing off lunch. With a beautiful panorama of the capital and the surrounding countryside, which has been designated a National Park, the authorities want to promote winter sports – but their hopes of attracting a clientèle seem somewhat optimistic at present. That was the end of our holiday. The very comfortable minibus took us to the almost deserted airport. It was like travel decades ago, with very few travellers around, cool and civilised, no long sweaty queues. On the plane was our group plus Albanian families mostly consisting of fathers, grandfathers and uncles, with infants who’d been taken to Albania to be shown off to the family and were now returning to their wives and mothers, left behind in Britain. Equality hasn’t got to Albania yet. But as far
as tourism is concerned, get there fast, as things are changing, and it’s
interesting as it is at present. You’ll enjoy a strange but instructive
trip. First published in VISA 92-93 (Aug-Oct 2010) |