This country’s Cold War paranoia left it riddled with bunkers. Now they’re coming back to life

By Justin Calderón, CNN

Tirana (CNN) — Walk by the home of Albania’s former communist dictator Enver Hoxha in central Tirana and you may not even know it. There is no sign to mark its historical significance. The two-story residence, humble by dictator standards, looks like it’s being remodeled instead of preserved, its wide windows crisscrossed by strips of painter’s tape. The home was only briefly open to the public once in 2018, and few have been inside since.

The current state of Hoxha’s residence sums up how many Albanians feel about the communist years. Having suffered a collective trauma of cruelty, many would rather forget he ever existed.

During the height of communist rule, the infamously paranoid and isolationist Hoxha closed off Albania’s borders, shot those who tried to leave, and built enough bunkers to house every family in the country. His regime’s mistrust of communist allies, use of state surveillance, and Stalinist-style brutality earned Albania the unflattering (but not inaccurate) nickname, the “North Korea of Europe.”

After Hoxha’s 44-year reign of terror ended in 1985 – and communist rule ended in the 1990s — Albania inherited as many as 221,143 bunkers and military objects, which for decades have served as solemn reminders of darker days — until recently.

Today, Albania is experiencing a tourism renaissance, supported by entrepreneurs and returning émigrés who are giving a second life to communist military structures once used to house weapons of war.

To reclaim their history and take back traditions once stolen from them, Albanians are now reusing bunkers and former military barracks as restaurants serving traditional food and wine, curiously unique settings for guesthouses, art and history museums, and even tattoo studios.

While Albania is still clearly picking up the pieces from its communist-era fallout, it’s evident that some are determined to take back control of the narrative and not let their country’s dark past define them.

‘Old is gold’

Drive 16 minutes up the mountainous hillsides outside of Tirana, past patchy farmland with grazing sheep, down a few zigzagging narrow streets, and you’ll be greeted by a mannequin dressed in military fatigues and a gas mask. Welcome to Kazerma e Cerenit, a former military barracks and compound turned into one of the city’s newest restaurants and agrotourism destinations.

This is the brainchild of Ismet Shehu, a UK-trained Albanian chef who once served lunch to the late Queen Elizabeth II, now returned home to build a growing empire of restaurants, his latest project being Kazerma (meaning “military barracks” in Albanian), which opened just a year and half ago.

He shows the way through the dining hall’s imposing doorway, the preserved main entrance to the original barracks, and proclaims, “Old is gold,” while making a sweeping gesture of his surroundings — the ivory-washed brick walls, original concrete columns with the dates ‘82 and ‘76 etched into them, and green grenade crates that now hold wine glasses.

What is currently a two-floor dining hall was once a spartan, cavernous garage for military trucks. It’s almost unrecognizable from its former incarnation, apart from the original iron rails supporting the wooden roof and punched-out holes in the brickwork that have been left untouched.

“Kazerma is about farm to table,” Shehu explains. “It’s about helping Albanians and our neighbors. When people come here, they say, ‘Wow!’, this place used to be for soldiers, it used to be for tanks, TNT and grenades. Now it’s a place of peace, people serving with a smile; you have good food and very nice desserts. And that’s a big change, right?”

Shehu walks on into a hallway where he has framed photographs of what the abandoned compound looked like before he was able to acquire the 100-year lease from the government to reform it.

One of the framed mementos is an old list of soldier’s rations on a piece of paper, browned and wrinkled by age, which reads: “120 grams meat, 200 grams bread, 100 grams pasta…”

In the spirit of the soldiers once stationed here, Shehu has maintained a military mess hall decorum, serving guests traditional Albanian dhallë (buttermilk) in aluminum canteen cups, and using trays and pans from military field kits to serve dishes of duck, pasta and flija, a traditional Albanian dish consisting of countless layers of crepes, typically made slowly over a wooden fire.

Waiters dress in military clothing, sometimes with a red communist party neckerchief.

“My staff is dressed as soldiers,” says Shehu, “And they do the service with a smile — and sometimes fake guns.” To end the meal, guests are presented with their check in a fake grenade pouch.

The military installation at Kazerma is vast, stretching out to include greenhouses, a duck farm, former military bunkers now used for wine and cheese tasting, a small military memorabilia museum, and several guest houses where people can spend the night.

It’s a unique hotel experience to write home about.

In the rooms, Shehu has placed large cylindrical concrete blocks to replicate barracks showers. Additional decoration includes old military radios, wooden rifle butts, and canteens used as flower pots.

While Shehu admits that the communist years were painful, his goal is for people not to fear the past, but to move forward from it.

“In the time of communism, I was very young,” the 35-year-old says. “But I know my father struggled a lot. I never want to forget what was before, but now the story has changed. We are making new things, this is the new Albania.”

‘Brink of starvation’

A few steps away from the Ottoman-era Et’hem Bey mosque in Tirana’s central Skanderbeg Square is another poignant Hoxha-era military bunker. Bunk’Art 2 is the country’s most important museum cataloging the atrocities committed under communist rule in Albania and is located in a preserved nuclear-grade bunker that once connected political offices of the central government.

The domed entrance to the subterranean bunker serves as a grim notice of what’s to come.

All 360 degrees of the gray dome’s interior are covered by photos memorializing victims killed at the behest of a leader who was so paranoid and cruel that just knowing him could put your life at risk.

One of the faces above the stairwell is Sabiha Kasimati, an old high school friend of Hoxha who urged him to stop killing innocent people, only later to be extrajudicially imprisoned.

Bunk’Art 2 has verified that about 5,500 people were killed by political executions during the Hoxha years, but unofficial estimates point to as high as 100,000 having disappeared under government custody. This means countless bodies have never been found, leaving Albanians to await the eventual discovery of mass graves.

“​​Albania had one of the world’s harshest communist regimes,” remembers Eni Koco, 50, the founder of tour group Albania My Way, who lived during those years.

“We became compared with North Korea because the government created a cult of personality, telling us they were gods and we needed to worship them, creating a system to control the borders and killing anyone trying to escape or enter the country.”

Deep down into the nuclear bomb-proof tunnels, exhibitions explain what happened here all those years Albania was cut off from the world. “The Sigurimi, or local surveillance police, controlled everything and were grooming people to spy on family and friends,” says Koco. Among items on display is a wooden broomstick with a listening device secretly implanted in its head, a tool enabling neighbors to spy on neighbors.

“By 1990, we were at the brink of starvation,” remembers Koco. “Even clothes and shoes were in short supply. There were only five models from which to choose, and everyone looked the same.”

In another parallel to North Korea, Albanians were told that they had nothing to envy from the outside world.

“We were fed constant propaganda that said we were the only country in the world that is building true communism and that we were the shining star,” Koco says. “This was in deep contrast to what we were living every day, and this created a certain syndrome of lying and disguising reality. Nowadays we still are very much afraid of expressing our real feelings.”

The Ottoman-era town of Gjirokaster in southern Albania has its own connection to the Hoxha legacy, being the dictator’s birthplace. Today, the building he was born in is officially known as the “Ethnographic Museum of Gjirokaster.” Only a lone marble slab on the floor of a sparsely decorated room commemorates Hoxha’s arrival into the world on October 16, 1908.

Just down the street, in central Gjirokaster, Manushaqe Zhuli, 65, has set up a private collection of Albanian antiquities in a tight bunker tunnel. She showcases items dating from Byzantine times to the communist years, and charges a small fee for people to visit.

The venture is private and she’s yet to receive any local government support. In Albania, confronting the raw realities of the past appears to still be a work in progress.

“The opinion of the world about us was damaged by the events of the ‘90s when we opened up,” says Koco. “We were totally unaware about the values that we were carrying and felt inferior to other countries. It took over 20 years for a considerable number of tourists to view Albania as a destination worth visiting.”

‘Reconnecting with our roots’

The secluded farming village of Fishtë is a place that many Albanians previously couldn’t even find on a map. That was until agritourism destination Mrizi i Zanave was born, transforming not only these lonely farmlands but also Albania’s historical gastronomic trajectory.

The rolling hills that now provide fresh vegetables for the restaurant’s guests are centered on a compound that was once a communist-era prison.

Today, instead of incarcerating people, the various rooms of the compound now host tour groups, showcasing once-lost Albanian traditions in cheese-making, viticulture and even pine cone syrup — an ingredient, commonly used in cheese spreads, that tastes like air from deep in a pine forest.

“The idea here is to reconnect with our roots,” says Altin Prenga, an agricultural engineer who, alongside his brother, is head chef at Mrizi i Zanave. “We became disconnected because of communism. We worked the countryside, but we were state workers, not farmers. We lost all our traditions and instead used communist techniques. Food became white and square. Bread, white and square. Cheese, white and square. It’s food without identity.”

On a hill above the restaurant, which acts as an outlook point for surrounding farmlands, Prenga points at the property’s main guesthouses. These showcase an unusual architectural feature — a missing chunk of brick wall. Prenga proudly says these gaps represent the missing piece of Albanian traditions that is his life mission to revive.

“We opened this restaurant with the dream to rebuild these roads (to our traditions),” says Prenga proudly pointing to the fact he employs local grandmothers and Roma people, a minority that has long been marginalized in Albania.

“Step by step, we have rediscovered what we lost from communism.”

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