Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Dating guide for communist party members

Dating guide for communist party members

Dating guide for communist party members


Because beneath the noise, the youth and colour of modern Tirana, lie the buried remains of another place altogether: An abandoned bunker lurks at the edge of Lake Ohrid near the Albania-Macedonia border. The Road to Tirana A maelstrom of jagged metal lay before us, a thousand engines throbbing as car horns screamed at one another through dense clouds of exhaust smoke.


A heavy rain fell across the highway, so that the moving metal parts of this infernal puzzle glistened almost organic beneath these grey skies. Up ahead, in the centre of the main road into Tirana, a vast Albanian flag ripped and crackled in the storm: Nothing quite prepared me for the chaos of Albanian traffic.


Looking at that road, it was hard to imagine how anyone was getting out of here before sundown. But gradually the rush-hour knot teased itself out, each car pushing, scraping and honking its way to freedom. Patterned concrete decorates communist-era housing blocks on the road into Tirana.


Archaea Tower unfinished. Tirana, Albania. TID Tower After three weeks backpacking around the countries that once made up Yugoslavia , Albania, at first glance, looked like more of the same. The border crossing from Montenegro was smooth and scenic: The view was so distracting that I hardly noticed the border formalities and then we were in, the bus weaving its way along the side of a river gorge on roads that appeared far too narrow, too precarious, to support this kind of traffic.


Cars double parked on every pavement, and men stood in the road amongst a chaos of traffic smoking cigarettes and talking. On one corner, a vendor was selling live chickens from a stack of wire crates piled up in the dirt. The Lana River flows through the centre of Tirana, Albania. First, the language. On roads signs and adverts, the logical, phonetic symbols of the South Slavic languages were switched for what looked to me, like a jumble of long indecipherable characters, studded with umlauts and with Qs in places that made no sense at all.


The second thing was the litter. Between the towns, fields lay scattered with the drifting ghosts of old plastic bags; with messy mountains of bottles and cartons and tins. On the riverbanks, bleached-white refuse hung from trees like wallpaper, marking the high tide level. From the bus I watched a goatherd drive his animals along the bank, and the goats all stopped to nibble at the low-hanging grey-white foliage of plastic and nappies. The third big difference, of course, was all the bunkers.


One of the many thousands of bunkers built by communist Albania, then later abandoned. Abandoned Bunkers of Albania Albania has a lot of bunkers.


A ridiculous number. They pop up like mushrooms out of farmland, mountain plains and all along the coast; they rise in bumps and domes from the grass of city parks.


Under the leadership of the increasingly paranoid Enver Hoxha, Communist Albania built more than , bunkers — an average of 5. The idea was that if the country were ever invaded, the population itself could be weaponised… everybody taking a rifle and retreating to their nearest reinforced firing position.


Even within the socialist world it was viewed as a pariah state, and these many thousands of bunkers were constructed to ensure that it stayed that way. The bunkers of Communist Albania were never used for their intended purpose; while the cost of this mad programme of bunkerisation is one of the main reasons for the poor social housing and poorer roads on display today.


Some of the bunkers have since been destroyed, others repurposed as storage space, livestock pens or even shops. Some of them have people living in, while just a few, closer to the border, proved useful during the Balkan wars of the s. A great many of them, however, have simply been left abandoned. A lonely bunker emerges from the surface of a park in central Tirana. I began to tune it out in the end, so that it just became part of the fabric of the place.


This was just what Albania sounded like, for me. Wet raincoats hung down the length of the entry corridor, permeating the wood-panelled stillness of the old building with a constant drip drip drip.


This former state building in Tirana, Albania, was repurposed as a facility to support those whose lives were displaced during the communist years. Monument to the Victims of Communism. By the time we hit the streets, I found Tirana immediately confusing. Tower blocks, painted pastel hues of purple and green, were fronted in intricate patterns of concrete latticework. Unfinished skyscrapers in twisting, dizzying shapes rose up above bursts of waxy vegetation.


Postmodernist churches popped and bulged from marble plazas, in between relics of Ottoman-era brickwork. The spoken language, meanwhile, was like no European tongue I had ever heard. We passed a monument, an undulating contortion of grotesque body parts misassembled into a lumbering headless giant; a memorial to the victims of Communist Albania.


From time to time, the constant rain grew heavier. On the ceiling an antique fan rattled noisily around, and tropical-looking plants sat potted in a window box. The waiter spoke no English. Tirana made absolutely no sense to me. On that first day of exploring, Tirana was all texture with no core. But the texture itself was compelling.


For three weeks in former Yugoslavia, I had been living on a diet of grilled meat, bread and beer. Here though, I was finding colourful beans and spices, stews and soups, and roasted vegetables stuffed with other vegetables. It was more than anything I could have imagined, a city where the relics of Communist Albania were almost lost in a jungle of entirely unpredictable sensations. Albania was a world apart from all its neighbours, to the extent that it felt thoroughly out of place in this corner of the Balkans.


Ask an Albanian though, and they might just tell you that theirs is in fact the native culture of the Balkans. Better to think of it this way: There are strong theories against this Illyrian hypothesis, too. The idea must have been irresistible for a nation recovering from centuries of often-brutal subjugation. Later, it would also add fire to the conflict with Serbia during the Kosovo War, with Albanian nationalists convinced that their people had owned these lands since long before the Slavs ever arrived into this part of Europe.


The caption on this film poster curiously, written in Russian reads: During those years, the theory was taught as unequivocal fact by Albanian schools and universities; there are even reports of new parents being persuaded to choose ancient Illyrian names for their babies. In Communist Albania, Hoxha encouraged his citizens to consider themselves the oldest race in Europe. The Pyramid of Tirana, Albania: The pyramid was originally intended as a museum dedicated to Enver Hoxha: Albanian communism ended in however, and after that there was little demand for a museum celebrating the life of a former dictator.


Meanwhile, as a tangible symbol for the excesses of Communist Albania, the pyramid would become a target for vandalism and looting. The clean white marble that once coated its flanks was stripped away, exposing the concrete underneath: Today the Pyramid of Tirana is largely abandoned though, and local children use it as a climbing frame.


When we arrived at the plaza, a group of local kids were climbing up the wet sides of the former museum. But then the rain intensified, and the children half-climbed, half-slid their way back down, got on their bikes, and left. At a gap in the sheetmetal wall, I peered into the space beyond: There have been local talks for years about demolishing the structure, and making room for new parliamentary buildings.


But the Pyramid of Tirana, today, feels like a fitting memorial in its own right. Not a museum anymore, but a mausoleum: The meet-up point was beneath The Albanians: In the picture, Albanian peasants and partisans stand clutching rifles beneath the national flag… and on either side they fade into history, uniforms growing more antiquated down the line as rifles are replaced for swords and bows and arrows.


A symbol of Albanian independence, charted as far back as Illyria. The heavy rain had scared off all the tourists. We had the guide to ourselves that day, so I was able to draw him into the kind of deep historical discussions that I thrive on, but most other travellers might find antisocial.


We talked in the rain for hours, until it got too bad and then we visited the National Gallery of Arts. There was an exhibition inside, of Albanian film posters dating largely from the s and 70s. The simple pop-art colours, the clean figures, smiling faces and national costumes, made them virtually indistinguishable from political propaganda posters.


Suddenly there was a commotion near the entrance, and people around us were turning to watch a new group of visitors arrive.




Dating guide for communist party members


Some of them have people living in, while just a few, closer to the border, proved useful during the Balkan wars of the s. Essentially the role is limited to budget and laws and the body tends to specialise in scrutinising day-to-day government business. In practice, executive control over congress procedures, including its own re-election, Dating guide for communist party members, lent substance to the view that it constituted an essentially self-perpetuating leadership. On Noche Buena, Christmas Eve, family and friends gather together and have a traditional Christmas feast with roasted pig, black beans and rice, Moros y Cristianos Dating guide for communist party members plantains, yuca and desserts like Arroz con leche rice puddingor rum cake. Monument to the Victims of Communism. First, the massive social dislocations produced by such changes have often led to economic collapseepidemicsand, most important, widespread famines. At a gap in the sheetmetal wall, I peered into the space beyond: A review of the subject's file reflects no activity that would warrant her inclusion on the Security Index. For the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, in June the Socialist grouping held all three elected arms of government:






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