National Geographic: Bunkerët e Shqipërisë, dikur sekrete të shtetit sot janë kthyer në muze

 National Geographic shkruan për Tiranën, si një qytet i veçantë i rrethuar nga malet, ku qeveria dhe artistë lokal kane zgjedhur mënyra të reja, të pazakonta për t’i dhënë pak shkëlqim arkitekturës komuniste dhe depresionit ekonomik. Qyteti është kthyer shumëngjyrësh dhe bunkerët janë kthyer në muzeume.

Pallate të rrënuara dhe banesat gri otomane janë lyer në ngjyra të forta portokalli dhe të verdha, ndërsa ndërtesat staliniste kanë shërbyer si kanavacë për të krijuar arte abstrakte kubiste dhe me vija.

Ishte Edi Rama kryebashkiaku i atëherëshëm i Tiranës (kryeministër aktual) që mori reformimin e qytetit duke lyer fasadat në të gjithë Tiranën dhe duke mbjell 55,000 pemë dhe shkurre në hapësirat publike.

Në artikull përmendet dhe historia dhe fiksimi i ish-diktatorit Hoxha me bunkerët dhe se si dy bunker janë kthyer në muze dhe hapësirë alternative për artin. Një bunker i cili ndodhet në qendër të qytetit dhe një tjetër më i madh në një kodër të Tiranës.

 

National Geographic: Once a state secret, these Albanian bunkers are now museums

In Tirana, the mountain-framed capital city of Albania, the government and local artists have chosen more vibrant and unusual ways to blaze their way out of years of dictatorship and economic depression.

Creative ideas and art transport Tirana, Albania’s lively capital city, far from its Communist past.

In many former Eastern Bloc countries, wrecking balls and social progress took out hulking Communist buildings and militaristic Cold War structures after the Berlin Wall fell. In Tirana, the mountain-framed capital city of Albania, the government and local artists have chosen more vibrant and unusual ways to blaze their way out of years of dictatorship and economic depression.

Crumbling, gray Ottoman-era mansions have been painted in shades of Creamsicle orange and rain slicker yellow; drab, Stalinist mid-rises serve as outsized canvases for jewel-toned Cubist abstracts or rainbow stripes. Much of the credit goes to former mayor Edi Rama, a painter-turned-politician (now Albania’s prime minister), who began a citywide beautification effort in 2000 that saw artists decking out building facades and city workers planting 55,000 trees and bushes in public spaces.

“When colors came out everywhere, a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people,” said Rama in a TED Talk. “It revived hope that had been lost in my city.” Residents and tourists now use the rainbow-tinted edifices as selfie backdrops, and the government claimed the paint helped crime go down and local pride go up.

Public art and paint aren’t the only forces moving this small Balkan capital beyond the oppression of the Communist era. Around Tirana, history museums fill former military bunkers and galleries dot neighborhoods once reserved for party officials.

A paranoid dictator and his bunker obsession

Until a decade or two ago, the most common souvenir you’d tote home from Tirana would probably have been an alabaster bunker ashtray, not a selfie taken in front of a colorful building. The domed tchotchkes pay wry tribute to the more than 173,000 bunkers (bunkerët) that once dotted Albania and its capital, bleak reminders of the 1941-1985 reign of dictator Enver Hoxha.

 

(These Brutalist monuments salute a country that no longer exists.)

Brutal to his citizens and notoriously paranoid, Hoxha believed neighboring countries Greece and Yugoslavia as well as former Soviet allies wanted to invade Albania. So from the 1960s through the early 1980s, he erected thousands of concrete fortresses around the country, ranging in size from two-person igloos to multi-room underground lairs. (For an idea of how pervasive the program was, see the recent documentary Mushrooms of Concrete.)

Their construction further isolated the country and drained its finances and energy, leaving it one of Europe’s poorest countries. In the end, all that cement mixing was for nothing. “Hoxha spent billions of dollars for his dream of bunkering (bunkerizimi) every inch of Albania, enslaving and bringing an entire population to the brink of starvation,” says Admirina Peçi, a local journalist and historian. “But history has proven that the real risk of attacks was zero.”

Today, though many bunkers have collapsed or been destroyed, hundreds remain, repurposed as animal barns; painted to resemble flowers in city suburbs; or, for teenagers, used as secluded hideouts to smooch. At some of Albania’s Adriatic coast resorts (about an hour west of Tirana), cement domes have morphed into food stands and changing rooms. Elesio Resort in Golem has turned its basement bunker into a spa; its domed roof, jutting up into the hotel restaurant, is lined with shelves that hold morning breakfast buffets.

Cold War hideouts become museums

The most elaborate repurposing of these doomsday structures is Bunk’Art, a pair of history museums/art galleries filling two underground nuclear shelters built for Hoxha and his allies. Amid stark, windowless rooms and thick steel doors meant to protect party leaders from a nuclear blast, video installations, artifacts, and contemporary art delve into 20th-century Albanian history, including the Fascist Italian occupation from 1939-1944 as well as the Communist era.

 “It was becoming increasingly difficult to come across symbols of Hoxha’s regime. The only pieces of Communism were the thousands of bunkers scattered all over the country like concrete mushrooms,” said Carlo Bollino, an Italian-born, Albanian-based journalist who helped to found Bunk’Art in 2014. “A museum inside bomb bunkers seemed like a formula for showing history.”

 

Both Bunk’Arts—one on the outskirts of Tirana, the other in the city center—hold an eclectic mix of history and art. An exhibit about the overemphasis on sports in Hoxha’s time slyly recreates a school gym; a basketball hoop holds a bust of the mustached dictator. At the entrance to downtown’s Bunk’Art 2, vintage photos of Albanians murdered by the Communist government line the domed entry as a soundtrack of their relatives’ remembrances plays.

 

“Albanians have a strong relationship with retelling the past,” says Driant Zeneli, a Tirana video artist with work at Bunk’Art. Since creatives have only been able to express themselves freely since Communism fell in 1990, Zeneli feels like the community is making up for lost time. “Today Albania is a place of big ideas and energy, with artists translating the transition from a long dictatorship. It’s the gaze of a generation understanding its past and looking at the future.”

 Source: National Geographic