Albania - Gjirokaster

From Sarande we folded ourselves into a stuffy bus for the journey to Gjirokaster, high in the hills. Our hotel was a restored Ottoman house, full of charm and cheap as chips. Stone arches, carved wooden ceilings and lacy white covers ran throughout. Our room, unfortunately, had none of these things, so we moved our books and music into the lounge and made ourselves comfortable.

The old town had a brooding presence, swamped in mist and rain. Steep cobbled streets plus sharp corners equaled exhausting walks and juddering taxi rides. The call to prayer drifted over the wind from a rare surviving mosque squeezed among houses. In Enver Hoxha’s time Albania was officially atheist and the country’s brand of nutty communism had its origins in Gjirokaster. A huge statue of the dictator has been toppled, replaced by a restaurant car park, but fresh pro-Hoxha graffiti was sprayed in the streets.

Perched above the old town sat an Ottoman castle. The silver shell of a US fighter jet was on display in the courtyard, ‘shot down’ in the cold war and left as rusting propaganda. Beside the plane but tucked inside the castle was a bar selling Turkish coffee in espresso cups.

There’s no clearer proof of Hoxha’s paranoia than the thousands of concrete bunkers which freckle the landscape. Regimented lines of these grey domes strike across the valley floor between Sarande and Gjirokaster, ready to repel invasion from Albania’s enemies [of which there were plenty]. Yugoslavia, Russia and China were Albania’s only cold war mates. Hoxha then fell out with all of them. Shops in Gjirokaster sold miniature bunkers converted to paperweights and ashtrays; the whole surreal spectacle reborn as tourist tat.