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- Following the successive Italian and German occupations (1939–44) during World War II, a communist People’s Republic was proclaimed in Tirana on January 11, 1946. The city subsequently expanded considerably with Soviet and Chinese assistance.
www.britannica.com › place › TiranaTirana | Location, Economy, Map, History, & Facts | Britannica
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Apr 24, 2024 · Following the successive Italian and German occupations (1939–44) during World War II, a communist People’s Republic was proclaimed in Tirana on January 11, 1946. The city subsequently expanded considerably with Soviet and Chinese assistance.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Shrouded in the shadows of a tumultuous past, Tirana’s communist history paints a vivid picture of a city once under the iron grip of Enver Hoxha’s regime. The political ideology of communism, rooted in Marxist principles, swept through Tirana, leading to a social revolution that aimed to establish a classless society.
In November 1941, two emissaries of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), Miladin Popović and Dušan Mugoša, called a meeting of three Albanian communist groups [citation needed] and founded the Communist Party of Albania, and Enver Hoxha soon emerged as its leader.
- 4,000
- 1703
The unexpected combination of the modern urban and the inherited architectures visually told, after the 90s, the city’s communist history and what followed thereafter. During Communism, the entire Block area was forbidden to ordinary citizens, who were supposedly too afraid to turn their heads and look at Hoxha’s villa from afar.
- Overview
- A paranoid dictator and his bunker obsession
- Cold War hideouts become museums
- A city colored by art
Creative ideas and art transport Tirana, Albania’s lively capital city, far from its Communist past.
In many former Eastern Bloc countries, wrecking balls and social progress took out hulking Communist buildings and militaristic Cold War structures after the Berlin Wall fell. In Tirana, the mountain-framed capital city of Albania, the government and local artists have chosen more vibrant and unusual ways to blaze their way out of years of dictatorship and economic depression.
Crumbling, gray Ottoman-era mansions have been painted in shades of Creamsicle orange and rain slicker yellow; drab, Stalinist mid-rises serve as outsized canvases for jewel-toned Cubist abstracts or rainbow stripes. Much of the credit goes to former mayor Edi Rama, a painter-turned-politician (now Albania’s prime minister), who began a citywide beautification effort in 2000 that saw artists decking out building facades and city workers planting 55,000 trees and bushes in public spaces.
“When colors came out everywhere, a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people,” said Rama in a TED Talk. “It revived hope that had been lost in my city.” Residents and tourists now use the rainbow-tinted edifices as selfie backdrops, and the government claimed the paint helped crime go down and local pride go up.
Until a decade or two ago, the most common souvenir you’d tote home from Tirana would probably have been an alabaster bunker ashtray, not a selfie taken in front of a colorful building. The domed tchotchkes pay wry tribute to the more than 173,000 bunkers (bunkerët) that once dotted Albania and its capital, bleak reminders of the 1941-1985 reign of dictator Enver Hoxha.
(These Brutalist monuments salute a country that no longer exists.)
Brutal to his citizens and notoriously paranoid, Hoxha believed neighboring countries Greece and Yugoslavia as well as former Soviet allies wanted to invade Albania. So from the 1960s through the early 1980s, he erected thousands of concrete fortresses around the country, ranging in size from two-person igloos to multi-room underground lairs. (For an idea of how pervasive the program was, see the recent documentary Mushrooms of Concrete.)
Their construction further isolated the country and drained its finances and energy, leaving it one of Europe’s poorest countries. In the end, all that cement mixing was for nothing. “Hoxha spent billions of dollars for his dream of bunkering (bunkerizimi) every inch of Albania, enslaving and bringing an entire population to the brink of starvation,” says Admirina Peçi, a local journalist and historian. “But history has proven that the real risk of attacks was zero.”
The most elaborate repurposing of these doomsday structures is Bunk’Art, a pair of history museums/art galleries filling two underground nuclear shelters built for Hoxha and his allies. Amid stark, windowless rooms and thick steel doors meant to protect party leaders from a nuclear blast, video installations, artifacts, and contemporary art delve into 20th-century Albanian history, including the Fascist Italian occupation from 1939-1944 as well as the Communist era.
“It was becoming increasingly difficult to come across symbols of Hoxha’s regime. The only pieces of Communism were the thousands of bunkers scattered all over the country like concrete mushrooms,” said Carlo Bollino, an Italian-born, Albanian-based journalist who helped to found Bunk’Art in 2014. “A museum inside bomb bunkers seemed like a formula for showing history.”
Left: A tunnel in the mountains outside Tirana, Albania, leads to Bunk’Art 1. The museum and cultural space located in a Cold War nuclear fallout shelter explores the country’s brutal Communist history.
Right: Windowless rooms at Bunk’Art 1 showcase Communist-era gas masks and other goods designed for surviving a nuclear blast.
Photographs by Alessio Mamo
Both Bunk’Arts—one on the outskirts of Tirana, the other in the city center—hold an eclectic mix of history and art. An exhibit about the overemphasis on sports in Hoxha’s time slyly recreates a school gym; a basketball hoop holds a bust of the mustached dictator. At the entrance to downtown’s Bunk’Art 2, vintage photos of Albanians murdered by the Communist government line the domed entry as a soundtrack of their relatives’ remembrances plays.
Though some critics claim repurposing or painting over Cold War structures is a cheap fix for crumbling infrastructure (or a white-washing of Albania’s dark history), these creative changes have brought optimism and forward motion to a city once considered dull and economically depressed. Punch-bright walls in older neighborhoods like Pazari i Ri and Ali Demi now draw tourists, and street murals, forbidden during Communist times, have bloomed all over town.
“Color was almost nonexistent in the public space [until the 2000s], but day by day, giant leaves, geometrics, dots and words appeared on building façades,” says local artist Ledia Konstandini, who has chronicled the changing city with illustrations and photos. “At the beginning, they looked out of place. But the more decorated facades there were, the more natural they looked. People overcame fear and boundaries with color, and it has become part of our urban identity.”
Just off the city’s central Skanderberg Square (a tribute to the 15th-century hero who fought off the Turkish), the National Gallery of Arts weaves together Albania’s past and present. Contemporary works—sound sculptures, photo journalism—keep company with a large display of “Socialist Realism” paintings and drawings.
See these forgotten Soviet bunkers around the world.
Mid 20th-century artists, “guided” by the oppressive government, made idealized images of farms and happy peasants. Pretty pictures—Kolë Idromino’s villagers in elaborate folk costumes, Isuf Sulovari’s head-scarved female factory workers—suggest a bygone Socialist utopia at odds with the exhibits at Bunk’Art.
A few blocks south, there’s another crumbling symbol of Albania’s Communist past, the Pyramid of Tirana. Built in 1988 as a tribute to Hoxha, the hulking cement and glass behemoth had fallen into disrepair in recent decades. But a futuristic renovation of the Brutalist behemoth started in February. It will see the space turned into a STEM school and cultural center, complete with an exterior slide.
Oct 10, 2020 · Inside Tirana, Albania’s Colorful Capital That Was Once A Communist Wasteland. By Natasha Ishak | Edited By Leah Silverman. Published October 10, 2020. Up until 1992, Albania was ruled under a merciless communist regime. But in 2000, the mayor of the nation's capital launched a city-wide beautification program — to stunning results.
Apr 18, 2018 · From 1944 to 1990, Tirana (and the rest of Albania) suffered a period of isolation during the Communist regime. Still today, traces of this historical period can be found in different areas of Tirana. To discover more, read our tips to find the best of Tirana’s communist landmarks.
