The Sunday TimesJuly 23, 2006
Feature
The land that time forgot
AA Gill
It was a communist state for nearly half a a century. Now it has organised crime and the worst-dressed teenagers in Europe. Will the world ever take Albania seriously?
In the unlikely event of your ever needing to know, Tiranas international airport is called Mother Teresa. It is grimly typical that the Albanians named their runway to the world after a woman who devoted herself to helping people die; and after a Catholic from a country thats 70% Muslim. Mother Teresa is the only internationally famous Albanian; all the rest are infamous.
As you walk across the tarmac, you might notice a couple of planes from Albatros Airways there is, again, an Albanian inevitability in naming your planes after the only bird that is an international synonym for bad luck, and which doesnt fly anywhere near the Adriatic anyway.
NI_MPU('middle');Any sentence with Albania in it is likely to get a laugh. Albania is funny. Its a punchline, a Gilbert and Sullivan country, a Ruritania of brigands and vendettas and pantomime royalty.
It is a tragic place. But just at the point in the story where you should be sobbing, you can barely restrain the sniggers. After all, Albanias favourite comedian is Norman Wisdom, and thats the place all over. Its funny because its not funny. The capital, Tirana, is a rare place, blessed with both fascist and communist architecture. The competing totalitarian buildings strut cheek by cheek down the potholed roads, like an authoritarian tango in marble and concrete.
The Italians, who had the most sympathetic fascist architecture, built the futuristically classical university art school and government buildings, while the communists made the thudding celebrations of workers triumph and the grim warrens of piss-stained grey boxes for housing the triumphant workers in.
Parts of Tirana look like small southern Italian industrial towns, tree-dappled, lots of cafes, while other bits look like Gaza, ripped up and smashed stretches of urban exhaustion and collapse.
But none of that is what you notice first. The thing that catches your eye and holds it in a sticky grasp, like a child with a humbug, is the colour. The grim apartments and public housing projects have been painted with broad swathes of livid decoration. They look like a giant installation of West Indian scatter cushions.
The multicoloured building was the very, very bright idea of Tiranas mayor. A man who the locals seem to think is suicidal and inspired in equal measure. When Albanias peculiar version of hermetic communism finally collapsed, in 1992, the new man said that, though there was no money to change anything, seeing as theyd been living in monotone grindstone misery for 50 years, they might brighten the place up with a lick of paint. Apparently, they got a job lot of all the colours Homebase couldnt sell in Cheshire and sploshed away. The result is both inspired and ridiculous, and very Albanian. Like a clowns make-up, it draws attention to the crumbling, gritty face underneath.
In the span of one long lifetime, Albania has been dealt a full house of political, social and economic experiments. It started the 20th century as a subservient state of the Ottoman empire, then it became a playground for every Balkan and Adriatic neighbour. At one time or another, Albania had seven competing armies trying to grab lumps of it. Briefly it was an imposed German monarchy, then an ineffective Austrian protectorate. In 1913 the Treaty of London drew its borders to suit the conflicting demands of Serbia, Greece, Italy, Austria and Russia, which left over half of all Albanians living outside their own country, principally in Kosovo.
At the Treaty of Versailles, the Albanian throne was absurdly offered to C B Fry, an English cricketer who was supposed to be such a paragon of masculinity that he was photographed naked and flexing at Oxford, and ended up running a naval prep school of exemplary cruelty with a dykey, sadistic wife. And then they got King Zog.
You really couldnt make up Albanias history. Zog was Europes last self-made monarch, and a man who made Charlie Chaplin look serious. He favoured light operetta, white hussars uniforms and waxed moustaches, and cut a mean tango; he encouraged the Italians to come and build things like roads and cafes. The bad news was, the Italians were Mussolini, so Zog had to make a dash for it and ruled in the Palm Court at the Ritz.
Then the Italians lost the war and the partisans took over; which might have been a good thing, except they turned out to be run by Enver Hoxha, the weirdest of all cold-war communist dictators, a man of stern cruelty and fathomless paranoia, who decided that the only two allies he could trust should be at the opposite ends of the world. Albanias only mates were China and Cuba, and it became proudly the only Maoist state in Europe.
Finally, long after everyone else had got a credit card and a mobile phone, Hoxha got cancer and died, and his unique chronic communism died with him. So Albania was welcomed out of the cold into the warm embrace of the free market. That should have been the good news, but of course it wasnt.
Theres a park in the centre of Tirana that was built by the workers for themselves. They dug a great lake, built an amphitheatre, made a little zoo with a mad bear. You get in by walking through a homeless incontinents toilet, past the busts of madly furrowed Albanian heroes and the small, neat British war cemetery.
In shady meadows, men cut grass for hay and young men sit on tree stumps staring at nothing. Around the lake, men fish without anticipation; behind them, other men squat and watch. Fishermen-stalking is a feature of former communist countries. As a displacement activity, its about as complete a waste of a day as you can come up with. Old men sit in the sun and play dominoes. Their peanut-butter-tanned bodies are wrinkled and polished like old brogues. They sit on cardboard boxes in those distressingly skimpy second scrotums that the communist world still clings to as attractive swimwear; they grin through bomb-damaged teeth.
These are the flotsam and detritus of the train wreck of a command economy, their jobs and pensions just another cracking Albanian joke. A man who was once a history professor looks out across the water at the speculative illegal palaces being built in the peoples park and tells me how the good news of capitalism came to Albania. We didnt know anything about markets or money. Suddenly it was all new, all opportunity, all confusion. And then there comes pyramid scheme. Youve heard of this pyramid? We put money in. They give you back many times more. You put that money back and much more comes. It was brilliant, this capitalism. Magic. Everyone did it. Maybe 70-80% of the country. People gave up their work to live on marvellous pyramid money. This was best two years of Albanias life. Drink and food and laughing; everyone is happy. Everyone has cash and hope. He stops and looks at the fishermen. But its fraud. Everyone loses everything, not just their savings but their homes and farms, and they borrow and theres no state to help. We have less than nothing; I lose my savings and my job. I dont understand.
You laugh. We were fools, yes, but what do we know of capitalism? It was a fairy story. And when its gone, people kill themselves, go mad, fight, scream and cry and want revenge. You understand Albanians have very, very
(he searches for the words)
strong emotion.
Albania was a nation of dupes waiting to be taken and they didnt take it well. Everything you understand or think you know about Albania and Albanians needs to be seen in relation to how they got the way they are. After the pyramid scam, Albania sold the only thing it had left: its people. They handed out passports and waited. There are 4m Albanian citizens in the world fewer than there are Scots. Three million of them live at home, the fourth quarter work abroad, and what they do is mostly illegal. Albania is the hub of the European sex trade, smuggling and pimping girls from Moldova and the Ukraine into the West.
Its said they also run most of the illegal arms trade, the cheapest Kalashnikovs you can buy. Theyre the Asda of mayhem. After years of being bullied, invaded, ripped off and lied to, the Albanians have grown very good at being frightening. Theyre not subtle, they dont deal in proportionate responses, controlled aggression or veiled threats. Albanians, Im told, have taken over the crime in Milan exporting organised crime to Italy beats selling fridges to Eskimos or sand to Arabs.
In the centre of Tirana theres an area known as the Block. Under Hoxha this was the closed, salubrious preserve of party members, patrolled by soldiers, forbidden to all ordinary Albanians. Now its grown into the all-night trendy reserve of the young: cafes, bars and clubs have sprouted back to back along the crowded streets.
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