Tirana: a lively, safe and rather surreal city -Express UK

If you want to have a unique travel experience go to the capital of Albania, Tirana: a lively, safe and rather surreal city. This is how the British media Express UK describes Tirana, in a long article about Albania, considering it “Europe’s forgotten Balkan beauty and a new hot spot for 2018”.

National Historical Museum mural-Getty Images

Everyone who visits Tirana for the first time, one of the most intriguing things they see is rainbow-colored apartment blocks.

“The capital Tirana is lively and safe and rather surreal. Part Mediterranean, part Soviet relic its rainbow-colored apartment blocks, painted on the orders of a former mayor to bring some cheer, are more faded pastel these days.

For good reason perhaps, Tirana’s citizens look on the bright side of life.

Ask them about Albania’s reputation as a gangster factory and they promise, only half-joking: “There’s no trouble here, we’ve exported all the criminals.”

Italian Modernist designs were the 1920s blueprint for today’s Tirana where tree-lined avenues connect the white, Futurist-style squares of Mother Teresa and Skanderbeg – the latter named after the nation’s medieval defender, a sword-swinging, wild-eyed sort invariably depicted perched astride a rearing horse.

The city’s cultural highlights include a triumphalist history mural guarding the entrance to the classical, artefact-packed national museum and the pretty 18th-century Et’hem Bey mosque’s minaret and rare floral mosaics.

Et’hem Bey mosque-Getty Images

Shopping, however, is a non-starter here as goods are run-of-the-mill imports and high street windows are mostly full of teeth-whitening kits and wedding wear. In the covered marketplace stalls green plums are piled high next to bunches of iron wort, the herb used to make Albanians’ favourite medicinal mountain tea, and racks of artisan raki spirit, distilled not just from grapes, but quinces, plums and mulberries. 

Behind Tirana’s modern art gallery I came across huge statues of Lenin and Stalin lying humbled, crumbling among the weeds. How the country is confronting its past can also be seen with the newly opened Bunk’Art 2 and The House of Leaves and other attractions in Tirana. 

House of Leaves Museum- Getty Images

Nothing makes contemporary Tirana’s emergence from that darkness more apparent though than seeing its chic café culture blossom at aperitif time. After dark the Bloc or Blloku is still the place to be, a leafy rectangle of villas and streets perfumed with jasmine and lime tree blossoms, where the Communist elite used to live a charmed life in affluent seclusion.

 

See full article: https://www.express.co.uk/travel/shortbreaks/911204/albania-travel-guide-review