Tirana — Capital of Albania
Tirana is the capital of a country that was once the most isolated in Europe — a communist dictatorship that banned religion, built 750,000 concrete bunkers, and broke with every major power on earth. Today its grey communist buildings are painted in vivid colours, and its story of reinvention is one of the most remarkable in modern Europe.
About Tirana — Capital of Albania
Tirana became Albania's capital only in 1920, making it one of the youngest capital cities in Europe. For most of the 20th century it was known as the seat of Enver Hoxha's communist dictatorship, which ruled Albania from 1944 until Hoxha's death in 1985. Under Hoxha, Albania became the most isolated country in Europe and possibly the world. In 1967, Hoxha declared Albania the world's first officially atheist state, banning all religious practice and converting mosques, churches, and synagogues into warehouses or gymnasiums. Across the country, 750,000 concrete bunkers were built — one for approximately every four citizens — as part of a paranoid national defence doctrine.
Hoxha's foreign policy was defined by successive ruptures. Albania broke with the Soviet Union in 1961 after Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation policies, then aligned with China, then broke with China in 1978 after China began opening to the West. By the late 1970s Albania had no meaningful allies and was in total isolation. After communism collapsed in 1990–91, hundreds of thousands of Albanians fled the country. In 1997, a series of pyramid investment schemes collapsed, wiping out the savings of much of the population and triggering a near-civil war that destabilised the state.
Albania's national hero is Skanderbeg (Gjergj Kastrioti), a 15th-century Albanian nobleman who abandoned the Ottoman service and led a 25-year resistance against Ottoman expansion. He is memorialised in Skanderbeg Square and the National History Museum in the heart of Tirana. The Albanian double-headed eagle on the national flag is associated with Skanderbeg's standard.
Modern Tirana tells a story of reinvention. When Edi Rama became mayor of Tirana in 2000 (he later became Prime Minister), one of his first acts was to commission artists to paint the city's drab communist-era apartment blocks in bright geometric colours and murals. The Pyramid, originally built as a mausoleum and museum for Enver Hoxha, has been repurposed as a youth technology and culture centre. Bunk'Art, a former nuclear bunker with 5 floors and 106 rooms, is now a museum of Albania's communist past.