Albania revisited ... and other places - part twelve

Aboard a hydrofoil from Corfu for a few hours back in Albania. This is the small coastal city of Sarandë. 

Why a photo of a Nescafé sign?

Because twenty-five years ago I took a picture from near the same spot. Then, in a hellhole of a country, signs (even ones carved into hillsides) praised Hoxha and the party. Now global brands are inescapable and Sarandë has more tacky architecture than Hoxha had soporific speeches. 

Children play (or at least they do in warmer weather) where desperate Albanians once considered swimming to Corfu. Most drowned, were shot or captured and dispatched, with their families, to appalling labour camps.

I’ve come, not just for old times sake, but to revisit an archaeological treasure. 

To reach it, we drive through the moody and melancholy Albanian countryside, if not soaked in blood then permeated with its memory …

… and arrive where I had watched the same crude, cable ferry cross to the other side of the channel and its 13th Century castle. At least it now has handrails of a sort.

We walk past a Venetian watchtower …

… and I am back in Butrint, a little known Balkan gem. This is not the time to adequately describe a site that, at least in legend, is linked with Trojan exiles, was certainly Greek, then Roman, and embroiled in the wars of Byzantium, Venice and the Ottoman Empire. 

Over the millennia it was an acropolis, a small city, then citadel, but, by the 1800s, reduced to a fishing village.

That was when the English writer and painter Edward Lear came. In his landscape, Butrint is the low hill just on the far side of the channel where the ferry now crosses.

The xenophobic and ultra chauvinistic Enver Hoxha recognized Butrint’s value for reinforcing his warped view of Albania’s history, but, in truth, Butrint was poorly preserved. When I first came, the area was mostly overgrown. 

We had to find our way through brush to reach this early basilica, built in the 6th Century.

The early church is a magical place ...

and, for few minutes, I linger alone. 

My reverie is broken when I remember Hoxha brought Khrushchev here in 1959. Hoxha later wrote (who knows if truthfully) that Khrushchev wasn’t particularly intrigued by the archaeological finds, far more interested in establishing a submarine base on Albania's coast. 

So, these lovely glades saw the Soviet leader, who, for all his faults, denounced Stalin and released many of Stalin’s prisoners, and the Albanian despot who honoured Stalin, imprisoned a country and sent so many to their deaths. No sign tells visitors that the two were here. I understand why; Albanians are defensive about their recent past. But modern history is just as compelling as the ancient.

I wander down to the water to watch a fisherman peacefully adrift on the Vivar Channel. Albania has changed and only for the better. The transition has been difficult and it remains the most backward part of Europe. But surely nothing could be worse than the place I first saw decades ago.

Time to leave.

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If you arrived at my Albania visit directly from the first post in this Mediterranean series, I hope you’ll return to the start:

http://trainsandboatsandplanesandtheoddbus.blogspot.ca/2015/11/albania-revisited-and-other-places-part.html

Albania revisited ... and other places - part eleven

I’m on a thirty minute hydrofoil trip from Corfu to a small city in southern Albania. For the first time in years, I am coming back. Today I’ll retrace just a few steps in what was once a true journey into darkness.

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Taken in Albania in the 1980s, this is a statue of Stalin. Thirty years after his death, denounced by the rest of the Communist world, he was opposite my hotel, still revered in Albania’s capital.

Europe’s most isolated and backward country, Albania was, arguably, it’s most oppressive Communist dictatorship,  a strange land detached from reality. 

I was thought to have been the first Western television reporter in Albania. I won’t retell my scoop, but will post some of my old pictures, faded images of the tragically curious place Albania was.

Overlooking the capital, Tirana, this was the grave of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s dictator from 1945 to 1986. 

I am happy to say that Hoxha’s remains have since been shifted to a relatively anonymous plot in the main city cemetery.

The words ‘Party of Enver’ atop some grim flats reflect Hoxha’s personality cult, rivalling that of Stalin.

More of the same.

‘Glory to Marxism-Leninism’.

Two pictures taken in Tirana’s main square. They show the Palace of Culture with the slogan ‘Glory to the Workers’ Party of Albania’. 

In 1967, Albania became the ‘world’s first atheist state’. Religion was banned. Priests and imams were murdered or imprisoned. The minaret to the Palace of Culture’s right became part of a museum. 

A weekday and Tirana’s one street light.

Following the regime’s well-deserved collapse (a year after the rest of Eastern Europe), I returned. My pose atop a bunker would have been formerly impossible. Such had been the paranoia that more than half-a-million shoddy bunkers may have been built.

Bunkers built on sand …

… and defending a little amusement park. 

Those were uneasy months (I once fell asleep to distant gunfire) as Albanians emerged blinking into a world they hardly knew. I was one of the few foreigners to witness the extraordinary transition.

One (not very good) picture and memory stand out. Near what had been Tirana’s ‘Enver Hoxha University’, some graffiti - SONY. I suspect for one young person hopes of a suddenly very different future were summed up in that word. Freedom (whatever that was) meant SONY. I often wonder who the person was and whether SONY lived up to his or her dreams.

In an odd way, I became rather fond of poor old Albania and returned twice in the 1990s. I don’t smoke and Albanian wine, at least then, wasn’t particularly good. But I was drunk and the conversation riveting as, absent secret police, Albanians’ pent-up thoughts spilled out. Some, I suspect, spoke more truthfully to a foreigner than to fellow citizens with whom they had suffered or perhaps committed crimes, if only the crime of collaboration.

To allow the reader a break, I will continue my day in Albania in the next post.

Albania revisited ... and other places - part ten

Piraeus, Greece. No idea what the manhole cover says.

Mark Twain writes of his vessel arriving in 1867: ’Away off … could be seen a little square-topped hill with a (sic) something on it, which our glasses soon discovered to be … the venerable Parthenon’.

Early I’m on Maasdam’s highest deck looking for the Parthenon, but find something more immediately significant.

Across the harbour (a long way, so the shots aren’t great), I notice a ferry unloading passengers. 

At first, I assume this is just one of the usual island ferries. Then, with binoculars, I realize these are Syrian refugees. They’re regularly brought overnight from the Greek islands closest to Turkey. 

Distant as they are, I am quite moved, especially after spotting children. You can also, I think, see some carrying Red Cross bags. The ironic (in the context) billboard ‘The port welcomes the citizens’ is aimed at a much different type of arrival. All Greece, with its own problems, wants to do is get the migrants further into Europe. 

After a few minutes, they’re mostly gone.

Leaving Maasdam at the bottom of a street, I walk to the Church of St. Nicholas. 

The chain slightly marring the picture supports a chandelier immediately below the dome.

Since Nicholas is patron saint of sailors (plus brewers, embalmers and pawnbrokers), stained glass appropriately shows the disciples on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus saving Peter.

When in Montreal, my Anglican father, inclined to the high church, would light a candle at Cathédrale Marie-Reine-du-Monde (conveniently located next to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel with one of Dad’s favourite restaurants). So, when possible, I light one for my parents. 

During Northern Ireland’s ‘troubles’, I recall lighting a candle in St. Patrick’s (what else?) in Crossmaglen, scene of many deaths. The IRA were doubtless observing the young man in civilian clothes who emerged from a British Army base, went to the church, stopped to buy some Guinness and strolled back to what, in effect, was a fortress under siege. The army supplied the base by helicopter as roads were too dangerous. Perhaps lighting the candle saved me from the consequences of an unquestionably foolhardy act. 

No escaping the news … hunt for the Paris killers, refugees, Greek economic crisis …

Still, this old boy doesn't look too worried.

A forest of expensive masts in Piraeus’s Zea Harbour …

… but, mid mega-yachts, a real fisherman who, because of poor lighting, I prefer in monochrome.

The nicely reflected ashtray is at a harbour side café. A waitress, learning I’m Canadian, says (in good English), ‘Oh! I’ve been in Canada!’ ‘Really, where?’ ‘Newfoundland and I love Tim Hortons!’ (as she serves an excellent, and not inexpensive, illy coffee). 

I came to Greece hardly expecting to make the trip’s first purchase at Marks & Sparks. However, as the store’s sadly long gone from Canada, I exit with a pair of pants. ‘That will be thirty-nine Euros, ευχαριστώ (thank you)’.

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Heavy weather and we’re on our way to Corfu. Seasickness bags have been put out. To port, you can see a Grimaldi Lines car transporter creating spray.

I’m reading Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s much anticipated The Broken Road, published after his death. Third in the trilogy, it tells of his 1930s teenage trek of more than a year from London to Constantinople. Off the Greek coast he writes, ‘Walking round and round on the deck, I thought of the triremes of all the empires that have sailed these same waters  …’

We pass close to Lepanto, where one of Western history’s decisive battles took place in 1571. This was the first major Christian naval victory over the Turks and last significant clash of oared galleys - successor to the triremes. There were thousands of casualties, so many they were difficult to count.