COLUMN ONE : In Albania, Concrete Reminders of the Past : The nation can’t afford to remove the 700,000 bunkers left over from an era of isolation. So people are recycling them into burger bars, churches, even discos.

Jonuz Kasni and his family live in a domed object from which inhabitants might be expected to toddle out intoning, “Take me to your leader!”

What the Kasnis call home looks like an inverted concrete saucer with protruding metal loops of inscrutable function. Its front door is a narrow portal so low to the ground that even the younger children must duck to get in.

The sole window was not intended to take best advantage of the breathtaking view, but rather to grudgingly accommodate the snout of a tank gun.

Having despaired of the poverty and backwardness of their hometown in northern Albania, the Kasnis have taken up residence in one of the ubiquitous defense bunkers that stud this majestic landscape.

The 700,000 sheltered artillery emplacements--dug into hillsides, shorelines and crossroads--are unique to Albania and reveal the paranoia that consumed the late dictator Enver Hoxha during the 41 years he kept this European country in hermetic isolation.

Hoxha built the structures after he cut his nation’s ties with both East and West. He wanted them to be able to withstand an invasion by forces of either the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the Warsaw Pact.

Now the bunkers are proving to be one of the most insurmountable legacies of the Stalinist era.

They are nearly indestructible and would cost a fortune to remove.

But the monuments to military madness are also inspiring ingenuity, like the comfortable, cost-free shelter Kasni has created for his transient family out of one of the larger versions of the concrete goose bumps.

In what may be Eastern Europe’s biggest challenge in beating Communist-era swords into plowshares, Albanians and foreign aid workers are making a virtue of necessity by brainstorming ways of putting their bounty of bunkers to practical use.

Farmers use them for chicken coops, keeping the birds inside by using woven twigs to block the gun sights and doorways.

Neophyte businessmen have converted well-located bunkers in Tirana, the capital, and the southern city of Gjirokaster into kiosks, burger bars, shoeshine stands, even discos.

One large tank bunker near the Greek-populated southern village of Goranxi has been topped with an Orthodox cross and will soon take in the faithful who were left without a place of worship after their village church burned down this year.

Kasni, who has lived for nearly a year in his tank bunker on the eastern outskirts of Durres, a seaport on the Adriatic, shrugged off suggestions that his family of six was enduring undue hardship. “This is better than what we had in Peshkopi,” the 45-year-old mechanic said of the crude mountain hut they had left behind.

He also insisted that his squatter’s home compares favorably to much of the dilapidated housing in Albania’s main cities.

Kasni has pirated electricity from the transmission lines that run along the nearby road, powering a huge television, a clock radio and a bare light bulb that hangs in the center of his yurt-like home.

Water is fetched from a creek running less than 100 yards from the bunker doorway. The contents of an outdoor privy are composted with garbage and leaves in a smaller bunker.

Government officials won’t say so for the record, but they concede privately that looking the other way at such illegal conversions has eased a catastrophic housing crisis brought on by too many disillusioned rural people on the move.

The bunkers belong to the government. The Defense Ministry built and has maintained them at a cost Albanian economists say would have financed the construction of an equivalent number of two-room apartments.

Although the Defense Ministry issued an edict last year forbidding willful destruction of the “strategic defensive positions,” government officials say they have no idea what to do with the bunkers.

“If Albania was a house with only one leak, it would be easy to find one umbrella,” Leka Bungo, spokesman for the ruling Democratic Party, said of Albania’s abundance of social and economic woes. “But this country is like a house with a roof that leaks everywhere, and it will take quite some time before we can get around to this bunker problem.”

Ideally, the government would like to remove the bunkers and clear the physical and psychological impediments to investment and recovery, Bungo said.

But he acknowledged that excavating and extracting the millions of tons of concrete would be unimaginably expensive, even for a country much better off than impoverished Albania.

For the time being, he suggested, Albanians will have to abide the eyesores or make what practical use of them they can.

Recalling that the former Communist regime kept a barber on duty round the clock at Tirana’s airport on the off-chance that someone might try to enter the country wearing a legally forbidden beard, Bungo said Albanians have become accustomed to living in “a country of the absurd.”

Hoxha ordered the bunkers--one for every four Albanians--sunk into every conceivable vantage point after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. An ideological zealot who emulated Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s most brutal tortures and repressions, Hoxha had already broken off relations with Moscow and every other Communist state, accusing their leaders of being unfaithful to totalitarian tenets.

Hoxha died in 1985, and the overthrow of communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe eventually spurred student revolts in Albania in 1990 and a fitful process of democratization that led to multi-party elections a year later.

Because of the bunkers’ association with the past, not everyone is enthusiastic about the de facto decision to keep the relics of a regime that cut Albania off from the rest of the world.

Many Albanians would prefer that the steel-reinforced concrete pimples be removed from sight, whatever the cost, to eliminate the constant reminders of generations of repression.

“They should all be destroyed except for a few that should be used as museum pieces, to show future generations how the previous regime squandered millions . . . on something completely useless,” said Angelushe Petani, owner of a private souvenir shop near Tirana’s main Skanderbeg Square.

Others, daunted by the costs and complications of destruction, suggest that the bunkers instead undergo a psychological renovation.

“We should paint them all,” proposed Fatos Lubonja, a former political prisoner. “We should invite children, artists, foreigners, important people visiting from abroad, to change the message by painting them however they want.”

The bunkers could be painted to look like flowers on the hillside, or sculpted, or wrapped in fabric, a la Christo, Lubonja said.

No government office has estimated the cost of digging up the bunkers. But foreign diplomats and casual observers note that the logistics alone defy contemplation.

What little antiquated excavation equipment has survived in the post-Communist chaos is put to better use in construction and mining, and the task of trucking away uprooted bunkers would overwhelm the country’s limited hoists and rolling stock. Then there would be the issue of where to take 700,000 variously sized hunks of concrete, each weighing up to hundreds of tons.

Maura Schwartz, chief envoy to Albania of the American aid group Volunteers in Oversees Cooperative Assistance, has taken on the bunker burden with relish. In a campaign to compile “1,001 Uses for a Dead Bunker,” Schwartz has dunned every Western diplomat, volunteer, missionary and potential investor for at least one idea before departure.

“You’re not allowed to leave the country without contributing,” she recently cautioned two visiting American correspondents. (They came up with proposals to convert larger bunkers into automatic carwashes and smaller ones into wine cellars--the latter suggestion proving highly unoriginal.)

Her idea bank covers an array of productive uses, from mushroom farms to marine breakwaters, crypts to camping shelters.

Other notions deposited with Schwartz include using the dank, dark structures for:

* Sealing up toxic chemicals, pending decisions about their disposal.

* Cultivating worms.

* Showcasing the insane works of communism by sending one to every museum in the world.

* Storing potatoes and root vegetables.

* Housing prisoners.

* Keeping bees for honey.

* Selling fast food, including a new chain aiming to boast of “700,000 Bunker Burgers Served.”

* Turning them upside down to use as goldfish ponds, barbecue pits and garden planters.

* Employing them, right side up, as pig-farrowing units, saunas or projection rooms for drive-in movie theaters.

Not all of the suggestions have been serious, like the proposals for dinosaur egg cups, heat-proof igloos for Alaska and giant juicers.

Some ideas, offered tongue-in-cheek, are actually in practice, like the ideas for using bunkers as outhouses or for taking advantage of their privacy for romantic trysts.

“A lot of people had their first sexual experience in a bunker,” observed a 24-year-old Tirana woman. “We didn’t have to wait for foreigners to suggest that.”