Isolated Albania: Land of Startling Contrasts

The first Albanians I saw were the soldiers in their olive uniforms lining both sides of the runway. They stood in the high grass, scattered every hundred yards or so, their backs to a seven-foot-high wire fence, their machine guns held at a 45-degree angle across their chests. Our small Alitalia plane landed a few miles outside of Tirana, Albania’s capital city. There were 16 of us on the plane and I was the only American.

We taxied past a small military base and when the propellers stopped, the airport was silent. The single terminal was about the size of a McDonald’s, and we passed more soldiers, each with a red star on his cap and either a machine gun in his hands or a pistol on his belt.

Eight decades ago my grandparents sailed from Albania to America, and 12 years after my first visa application, I was finally allowed into Albania--both as a journalist and to meet relatives.

For three weeks I traveled through the most isolated of the European Stalin-inspired Communist nations and met dissidents, loyalists and the dreaded Albanian secret police, called Sigurimi. I also saw the grinding poverty of this Balkan country between Yugoslavia and Greece on the eastern coast of the Adriatic.

Yet Albania’s mountainous countryside is remarkable, the trip is modestly priced, by European standards, and since its borders have been essentially closed for half a century, a trip to Albania is one of the most exotic stops on the continent.

It was on the late-afternoon drive from the airport in an 18-year-old government-owned Volvo that I first came to view Albania as a Third World nation.

The roads were choked with peasant farmers walking home. They toted hoes over their shoulders, or swatted flocks of goats, sheep or cows to the side of the road. In the fields, plows were still being pulled by oxen and horses. And there is so little vehicle traffic that Albanian pedestrians have no instinct for cars, so our driver had to toot his horn every 10 seconds to alert them that a car was coming.

In 20 minutes we arrived at Tirana, a city with a mix of aging two-story, red-tiled buildings and newer concrete slab apartments, usually no more than six stories tall. One of the narrow streets emptied into the vast modern Skanderbeg Square, where an old mosque fronts one corner adjacent to the modern Palace of Culture, which is next to the Museum of National History and overlooks a large fountain.

Two statues important to Albania’s history dominate the square. One is of an Albanian warrior named Skanderbeg who drove out the Turks in the 15th Century. The other is a bronze likeness of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s first Communist dictator who chased the Nazis out of Albania in 1944. The statue of Hoxha, who died five years ago, stares out over the square, arms behind his back.

The hum of rush hour begins at 5:30 a.m. in Tirana--most jobs start at 7 a.m.--and the square is thick with pedestrians, buses, bicycles and motorcycles. Yet throughout the day, you can hear birds, roosters, sheep and the clop of hoofs as occasional horse-drawn carts roll by.

Even in Albania’s bigger cities, life operates at a quiet, country-like pace. The usual city sounds are absent: There are no booming stereos, no drag-racing cars, no airplanes or helicopters.

I was quartered in the 15-story Hotel Tirana, the city’s tallest building and one of two foreign tourist hotels. Rooms cost $30 to $45 a night, and you can leave your American Express card at home. The hotel accepts traveler’s checks or cash. When you change money at the hotel, you are given crisp new Albanian leks, seven to the dollar although the black market rate is 40 leks to the dollar.

Tourist needs are filled inexpensively.

Three weeks’ laundry was a mere $39. And the hotel gift shop was well-stocked with what in Albania are luxuries: Marlboros, Scotch whiskey, Italian toothpaste. I bought an Albanian folk rug for $84. When shipping it to the United States proved impossible, I folded the six-by-nine-foot rug into my suitcase.

Traveling in Albania means suffering through a news blackout. There is no International Herald Tribune for sale, and phoning out isn’t easy. The entire country has a single, one-inch-thick phone book, so it came as no surprise that I waited three days to get a telephone line to the United States.

While I chatted with my wife on a phone at the front desk, the receptionist consulted his watch and a dozen people stopped to stare at the person speaking English. After I hung up, the receptionist announced that I’d been on the phone four minutes and charged me $1.40 a minute.

Food ranged from fair to fairly good. Hotel menus were loaded with veal and lamb dishes, which tended to be good. Pan-cooked farm cheese was quite fine, as were the bread and salads served with Albanian olive oil.

Avoid the pasta and ice cream, but you might want to try the Albanian wines. Although the Merlots and Rieslings tend to be thin and acidic, at $2 a bottle why complain? The government sets all restaurant prices and they are highest in Tirana. Yet a four-course meal with wine still costs only about $10 a person.

Tipping was interesting. Waiters and maids, except one, readily took my tips, although technically it is not allowed. At one lunch when I had a guest, a waiter overcharged me by 10 leks ($1.40). The next morning I called him over. I got out my dictionary and in Albanian wrote: “lunch, yesterday, overcharged 10 leks.”

I also wrote “inform,” and laid out the two business cards of my government guides. The waiter responded, “No problem,” and promptly slipped me a 10 lek note. It was a cheap exercise in Stalinist power.

Night life in Tirana, indeed most social life in Albania, is a world of men without women. Legally, women and men are equal, but this equality hasn’t worked its way into the home. Barbershops, which are open late, are filled with men reading the paper, smoking and taking their daily shaves. And the women? They’re to be found at home cooking, cleaning and tending the children.

One evening I went to an outdoor cafe in Tirana with a woman cousin. There were about 100 men at the cafe but only three women. Bicycles and a few motorcycles, the most luxurious item an Albanian can own, were parked close to the tables so no one would steal them. Two men near us were having dinner, drinking raki , or Albanian vodka, and chewing on green onions they had brought with them.

“If you are a woman,” my cousin announced, “you must do everything before you are married.”

The new Hoxha museum is Tirana’s most striking building. The low-angled pyramid seems to have a touch of I.M. Pei, with white marble triangles jutting to the ground. Tickets for foreigners cost $1.50 and must be paid in hard currency.

There, on four circular floors, you see Hoxha’s pistols, hunting boots, videotapes of his speeches, 69 volumes of his wisdom, pictures of him with Stalin. There is no mention of the Sigurimi or purges or forced labor camps. Another of his legacies waits outside: a plainclothes Sigurimi patrolling the front door.

It was easy to meet Albanians, especially younger ones, because English is the most common foreign language taught in school and because Americans are still a rarity.

One morning two Albanian computer nerds introduced themselves. One pleaded for my help to get replacement parts for an Apple computer and to track down his relatives, who lived somewhere in Manhattan. His sidekick had relatives too. Could I possibly locate them in Argentina?

Some of my relatives invited me home for an elaborate meal. Meat isn’t always easy to find, but on short notice they’d laid out sausages and cold beef, vegetables and some fruit (also hard to find), beer, wine, raki and home-made chocolates.

Whenever relatives invited me for a meal, I always had the sense we were using up a week’s worth of food. But there was no turning down another helping. It’s part of the warmth of the Albanian people to entertain lavishly.

My relatives were eager to know how Americans live and how much money we make. They were astounded when I told them my wife and I owned two cars even though one of them is 8 years old. My host, 80 years old and a hard-core Communist, shook my hand in congratulations.

On the wall was a photo of his brother, killed during the Albanian revolution at the end of World War II. He was buried in the martyrs cemetery. His sister, a fierce loyalist, told me she’d raised her three children “the right way. They are Communists,” she said.

Most tourists travel in air-conditioned buses. I wanted to see how Albanians got around, so I took a train to visit relatives in Durres, a port city 20 miles west of Tirana.

The 90-minute ride was torture. The railroad cars were about 40 years old, it was about 95 degrees inside and the ceiling fans didn’t fan. There was no food car, no water fountain. Albanians chain-smoke and there was a raw smell from the toilets. Graffiti is rare in Albania, but I spotted Sony, Guns N’ Roses and Ozzy Osbourne scrawled on the train.

One morning, my guide Ilir Gjoni, his driver and I set out in the relative luxury of the Volvo for Shkodra, an industrial city in the north, about 50 miles from Tirana. But it took 2 1/2 hours to cover the distance over the narrow, pockmarked roads.

Albania is 210 miles from north to south and only 90 miles across, but three-quarters of the land is made up of hills and mountains. This makes for magnificent countryside and a farmer’s nightmare. We passed goats, oxen, chickens, sheep and cows on the road, next to which grew red poppies. In the distance we saw farmers bent over hoes, tilling the fields.

That evening, I went for a walk, and as was true at each hotel, kids were waiting outside to beg for pens and chewing gum (gum isn’t sold in Albanian stores). It was painful to see such thin children with worn clothes. One boy in shoes without laces that were several sizes too big followed me for half a mile before I understood he wanted my pen.

I toured eastern and central Albania as well, but friends who had visited the country kept saying the south was the most beautiful part so my trip turned south to the Albanian Riviera. Maksim Dinga, an ex-diplomat and one of the few plump Albanians I saw, was my guide.

After a drive of several hours in another ancient government Volvo, we approached Gjirocastra, a city of 25,000 constructed almost entirely of stone. Gjirocastra was the birthplace of Enver Hoxha--his house is now a museum--and the city is built on a mountain slope from nearby stone outcroppings.

Nearly everything is of stone: the sidewalks, houses, streets and roofs, with white and beige the dominant city colors. Walking the steep, narrow streets made of geometric white stones, you could smell the pine trees, hear the bleating of sheep and above see a castle built in the 2nd Century AD that once formed the original city.

We drove past citrus, olive, cherry and apple orchards, past mountain springs diverted to irrigate the terraced farm land, before coming over a last hill that dropped steeply into the sea town of Saranda (population 20,000). The city has pastel shades, white-walled buildings, red-tile roofs and palm trees lining the streets. There is a striking view of the Greek island of Corfu only a few miles away, and foreign tourist ships hug the island to stay out of Albanian waters.

At the Butrinti Hotel, I stayed in a two-room suite ($40 a night), with a balcony overlooking the water, remote-control color TV, refrigerator, seven Oriental carpets and lush purple bougainvillea below my room.

Maksim and I visited his friend who lived in an apartment building on the gentle rise above the Saranda harbor. Even though Saranda is a small city, the influence of Western life is beginning to filter in.

Since last year, ferry boats from Corfu have docked for the weekend, bringing European visitors. There is talk of building a superhighway between Saranda and Greece to boost freight traffic. And that day, as I sat in Maksim’s friend’s apartment eating sticky candies, my host showed off his homemade TV antenna. CNN suddenly came on, the signal picked up from Corfu, and a newscaster talked in English about that morning’s Dow Jones industrial average.

A few days later, Maksim and his driver took me to the airport. One of my cousins rode along. At the airport we jumped out, except for my cousin.

“I don’t know how to open the door,” she said. It was her first car ride in several years.

My last minutes in Albania were passed in a hot, locked waiting room with armed guards posted outside the door. Among the passengers waiting for the plane to Rome was a man in a dark pin-striped suit, sweat pouring from his forehead. He was a New York banker who’d been invited by the Albanian government to set up some credit agreements.

Horse-drawn plows and New York bankers. The mysteries of car door latches and CNN. These are the contradictions of Albanian life: Vestiges of a 19th-Century society remain, even as this century starts to recede.