EL PAÍS: Tirana, the city of mixed architecture and cultural coexistence

Tirana is a unique city for its mixed architecture. You find here some Ottoman style, Fascist and Stalinist architecture and nowadays modern buildings. This is one of the main elements attracting journalists and bloggers who visit our country and write about it.
The famous Spanish daily newspaper, El País has dedicated an article about Tirana and Albania, highlighting some facts mainly about the transition of the capital city from ugly communist buildings transformed into colorful ones.  

Colorful building in Tirana
Credits: Visit Tirana 

‘In mid-June, the Scanderbeg square had a huge restoration and it reopened on 10th of June, 2017, conceived as a large open space for the enjoyment of citizens. A few days later, a nightly rock concert would test the cultural coexistence in the capital of Albania, land of contrasts.

Pluralism is the paradoxical hallmark of a country that for almost half a century incarnated since 1945 the opposite, under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, an obsessive Stalinist who made Albania a great prison. Today, a painter, Edi Rama, with a pro-European vocation, heads the government and as mayor of Tirana turned the capital into a universe of colors (with numerous facades painted with lines and geometric motifs), which allows us to appreciate the coexistence of a brilliant Italian fascist architecture (Twenties and Thirties), Stalinist waste (including a pyramid in honor of Hoxha) and arguably modern urbanism.

House of Leaves Museum
Credits: Visit Tirana 

In Tirana there are museums, like the interesting National Historical Museum; urban diversity and exceptional examples of the Stalinist past. The operation of a regime of total surveillance is explained in the new museum called House of Leaves, focused on the methods of the Sigurimi: highlights the repertoire of bugs, beetles, small listening devices. Good introduction to the Soviet paradise. To protect it, in the manner of Beijing, through bunkers that closed the access, Hoxha created a neighborhood-residence of the leaders, the Block. Now it gathers the places of leisure and restaurants.’ 

See full article here!