Sarah Drury

Albania

Charming: Skanderberg Square in Tirana [Getty Images]

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. Unless you’re in a place which caters for tourists, such as the Unesco sites of Gjirokastra, Berat and Butrint, or are trekking through spectacular mountain scenery, you may be left with no more to occupy the brain than wondering how the countless onion sellers along the shores of Lake Ohrid make enough to live on, or why Albanians seem obsessed with mirrors, to the extent of putting them on the inside of lavatory cubicles, or how exactly to pronounce ‘Gjithcka nis me nje’, a frequent exhortation on Nescafe billboards.

Being interested in the wartime activities of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, I had ploughed through a lot of literature, but while this prepared me for the scale of the country-side, it had also given the impression of an unforgiving, suspicious race.

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