The story of Albania's bunkers

From bunkerization to business: Albanians are turning concrete lemons into lucrative lemonade.

Dava Hazzan, a Canadian travel writer, impressed by the history of Albania’s bunker decided to explore our country and write a deep article for bunkerization in Albania on travel website “Roads & Kingdoms”. Dava has visited some of bunkers and interviewed owners about how they ended up using bunkers as “businesses”. A brilliant story that everyone should read, as he Hazzan claims that: “35 years after the last bunker was built, Albanians are coming up with all sorts of ingenious ways to turn concrete lemons into lucrative lemonade.”

Photo credits: Jo Turner

Across this tiny country of 2.8 million people, thousands of bunkers continue to dot the landscape. How many thousands, no one knows. Indeed, no one knows how many were built in the first place; estimates range from 150,000 to 750,000. Accurate records are either lost, destroyed, or weren’t kept in the first place. Some bunkers are little steel pillboxes, with just enough room for a man and a machine gun. Others are enormous underground complexes, the size of villages, designed to protect the entire Albanian government from the nuclear attack they thought was imminent. They run from the coast to the mountains, north from the former Yugoslavia, south to Greece. They never saw action, and are today considered a monumental waste of money and resources. Communist Albania didn’t have enough for bread or decent housing, but apparently had plenty to build one bunker for every 11 Albanians.

But they are not without their uses, and 35 years after the last bunker was built, Albanians are coming up with all sorts of ingenious ways to turn concrete lemons into lucrative lemonade.

To understand why Albania invested so much of what they had into bunkers requires a crash course in post-war Albanian history. Following the defeat of Albania’s Fascist and Nazi invaders, Enver Hoxha’s communist Albanian Party of Labour took power.

Photo credits: Jo Turner

They ruled with an iron fist. More Stalinist than Stalin, Hoxha’s rigid ideological vision caused him to break, one by one, with every other Communist nation in the world—Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, China—until, by the end of the seventies, they were without allies, alone against the world.

Photo credits: Jo Turner

Read original article: http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2017/albanias-bunker-problem/