Seferis’s line about his native Greece, ‘Our country is a closed in place, all mountains’, haunted my mind as I traversed Albania. I had gone in the hope that Albania now would be like the southern Europe of my student days. The news in brief is: it is, and it isn’t. First impressions of Tirana, the capital, were that it was a city in a hurry to expand. Despite being badly damaged in 1944, it retains an unexpected charm, perhaps because of Mussolini’s pine-lined boulevards and green spaces. The surrounding plain, however — particularly the highway out to the airport — is littered with speculative buildings of various degrees of hideousness, some stalled in a half-completed stage with the ubiquitous notice reading ‘Shitet’ (For Sale). A moratorium on construction has been imposed, rather late in the day: coastal resorts, even sleepy Saranda, have been badly served.
Grappling with the ins and outs of Albania’s history over the past two thousand years may or may not appeal to the visitor, but it certainly puts flesh on what can appear to be rather naked bones.
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