– P. Kogan, 1987 –
In March 1987 I visited Albania for eleven days as a guest of the Albanian Committee for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Apart from five days in Tirana, I made trips to Durrës, Berat, Gjirokastra, Saranda and Korça. Since I teach in a university in North America, my primary interest was in acquainting myself with the country’s cultural and educational institutions and in getting an impression of the daily life of the people. Having lived all my life in countries where there is exploitation and private ownership of the means of production, I was curious about the way people spent their working life and leisure and how they experienced their social and family relations. Free to go anywhere and to see anybody, I was assisted in my meetings and conversations by an excellent interpreter; I also found that many people speak English, which they study as a second language in schools.
Before going to Albania, I had talked to several persons who had been there, and read a number of novels and history books which made me familiar with the transformation that had occurred there since World War II. I had also seen pictures of urban and rural life in books and magazines. Looking forward to my journey, I was keen to learn about life in a country which had eliminated exploitation and which had successfully repulsed all external and internal attacks on its independence. In 1944 Albania was probably the most backward country in Europe; its people were poor and illiterate. I wanted to observe the changes in the lives of people over the past forty years.
Landing at a beautifully-landscaped, small airport, I was received by a gracious and hospitable representative of the Albanian Committee and an equally courteous interpreter, who ushered me into a waiting room, offered me an orange drink and asked me if I had a pleasant trip. I gave them some idea of what I wanted to do in their country, and they assured me that they would make the necessary arrangements.
My car ride to the Hotel Dajti in the centre of Tirana gave me my first visual picture of the country and took me by surprise. Before me unrolled a well-manicured landscape of fields and trees, buses and bicycles, a few trucks and cars on the two-lane road, and people working or walking everywhere. A peaceful and picturesque scene, unspoiled by urban blight or commercial messages, dominated entirely by people. I felt both thrilled and shocked by it. Instead of the industrial pollution, congestion, dirt and menacing city blocks of North America, I was looking at wide, tree-lined streets, low-lying apartments, and clean parks and squares. It was as if the whole scene had been planned to demonstrate and underline the prime significance of people; nothing distracted me from the proud and upright individuals who went about their business fearlessly and unhurriedly. What shocked me was the contrast between this crowd scene and that of a typical North American city. The Albanian crowd is friendly and cohesive; crowds in North America are hostile, alert and apprehensive about others. Since it was still cold in March, men, young and old, wore dark woollens, coats and scarves; women were in pants or skirts, in dark colours at work and in bright ones at leisure.
I entered Skanderbeg Square at about four on a cloudy afternoon. People were strolling around or in conversation everywhere and showed no signs of pressure or stress. The restaurants and cafes were bustling with customers. Standing in the middle of the grand square, people breathed the air of freedom and exuded an aura of self-confidence. Everybody acted free and congenial in the streets and squares, in shops, in libraries, at movie houses and in palaces of culture and museums. These people had rid themselves of such centuries-old problems as unemployment, poverty, and cultural and spiritual impoverishment.
Since nobody was making money off the guests checking into the hotel, nobody had to protect himself against potential dangers which beset anyone going from an airport to a large hotel in a North American city. None of the transactions involved private gain or hustling. I unpacked my clothes in my large room with a toilet and bath and decided to get some rest after my long air journey. I could not conceive of a happier ending to my two flights from Toronto to Zurich and from there to Tirana.
Soon after my arrival at my hotel, I got a message that a variety show of folk songs and dances was being given in the theatre at the Palace of Culture in Skanderbeg Square. I went to the theatre immediately. When the curtain lifted, I was dazzled by the colourful and elaborate costumes and the energy and rhythm of the dancers. The troupe consisted of professional and amateur performers. The audience, many of whom were school-age or younger children, applauded and cheered every number and watched the program attentively. An orchestra accompanied the singers and dancers and played with skill and discipline. The hall itself, seating about 800, was elegantly decorated with flowers and banners. The performance was affordable for everybody because of the low ticket prices. People attend music and theatre productions before supper, but the movie houses are open all afternoon and evening. I returned to my hotel and had dinner with my hosts.
After breakfast the next morning, I got a ride around town through streets with public buildings, apartments with shops on the ground floor, schools, University of Tirana buildings and parks. Most of the buildings are made of cement and brick painted in yellow or greenish colours. About eighty per cent of the population resides in state housing, the rest in private houses. Population numbered only about forty thousand in Tirana after the war, but it has since grown about six-fold and the city is full of new structures, the latest addition being the stately Palace of Congresses about three blocks from my hotel. I again noted the way human activity dominated the streets.
Immediately after the drive, I went to the large “Albania Today” exhibition of industrial and cultural progress through the past forty years. Apart from the physical and statistical evidence of increase in productivity, the display of items from shoes and cotton to copper and hydro-electric projects demonstrated how the country had developed its human resources to overcome poverty and backwardness. The country’s greatest treasure and resource is its people, who now are universally literate and possess all kinds of skills to ensure uniform growth. Unlike North America, where illiteracy is on the rise and unemployment is chronic, everybody in the towns and villages can read. While not many could spell their own names in the 1930s, now the signs of literacy abound everywhere — in the countryside and urban areas, in the mountains and along the coast, in factories and in state and collective farms. The number of books, magazines and newspapers published in Albanian and other languages is one sign. Another is the presence of a bookstore and a public library in every village and town and a large number of children’s books in print. Translations of the classics and modern writers from various countries into Albanian abound. Many people can read and speak Russian, French, English and other languages. People can handle complex medical, engineering and other problems because they can read. The “Albania Today” exhibition presents moving testimony to the creative and scientific accomplishments of this newly-educated people.
From the exhibition I went to a large park within minutes of the city centre. In the middle of it is a cafe which serves coffee, raki and other drinks. The grounds are full of retirees, students and others. My next stop was the Gallery of Figurative Arts which specializes in paintings and sculptures of twentieth-century Albanian artists.
Late in the afternoon I drove to Kruja, a town erected around the ruins of Skanderbeg’s castle, in which a new museum has been built. The museum is dedicated to the national hero and has paintings and sculptures of historical figures and murals of the battles fought by Skanderbeg. It has historical documents and a library of over a thousand volumes dealing with Skanderbeg, published all over the world. One of the books was published in Toronto. This library explains why poets like Edmund Spenser delineated the Albanian nationalist in these words: “Great both by name, and great in power and might, / And meriting a meere triumphant seate.” The museum also had some coins and other artifacts from Illyria of 800 B.C.
On my third day I met with the Head of the Albanian Committee for Friendship and held a wide-ranging conversation about the cultural and educational changes in the country. My host spoke in a touching manner about the oppression the country had suffered for centuries, and he stressed how one of the goals of their education is to end the oppression of women, to discard backward customs and to enable women to contribute fully to the growth of their economy and culture. Women now study in schools and colleges, work in factories and offices, teach, earn the same pay as men, and have achieved equal status with men. They began to improve their conditions when many of them participated in the war against fascism and increased their percentage in the workforce. I was also told how difficult it had been for tradition-bound families to grant women the right to equality and to let them enrol in schools and prepare themselves for jobs.
Since the 1940s, Albanians have taken immense pride in recovering, preserving and analysing their national heritage. They have uncovered much through archeological and historical research into their own past. The results of this exploration can be seen in the Museum of National History, which depicts the tortuous course of history from the Illyrian times to the 1980s. It shows implements, utensils and weapons from prehistoric times; it explains the significance of Greek settlements, Roman and Byzantine influences, and Turkish occupation. The museum characterizes the main features of the renaissance of culture from 1830 to 1912 and the subsequent struggles. Various rooms show how Albania eliminated private property and private ownership of the means of production and how it ended exploitation and oppression.
In this and other museums, one notices the huge sacrifices people made in their battles against oppressive regimes, and a large number of young people have died in these struggles. Albania has erected monuments to its martyrs in every district, and the Monument of National Martyrs overlooks the city of Tirana. Enver Hoxha is buried there among hundreds of young fighters against fascism and other oppressors. I paid my profound respects to the martyrs.
In the evening we drove to Durrës, a seaport and popular resort, which draws large crowds of visitors from European and other countries. Passing through numerous collective-farm villages and scenes of men and women working in the fields, I arrived there in a heavy rain. One of the cultural institutions of Durrës is the Archeology Museum which possesses objects going back to Illyrian times, and vases and pottery from the Greek period. Not far from it is the site of an amphitheatre erected by the Romans for gladiator fights and other sports. In its vicinity lie the ruins of a medieval castle.
My next stop was Berat, and as we approached our hotel we saw a large crowd assembled outside a movie house. I learned that they were trying to obtain tickets for a variety show being given by amateurs from a factory, with the assistance of a well-known singer and a comedian from Durrës. The hall was filling up fast, and when I got to my seat, it was packed; even the aisles along the walls were full. Musical and other events draw full houses all over the country. Most people take up music, dance and other arts and perform locally and nationally. This extensive cultural activity has been nurtured by the fact that every village and town has a cultural house, an orchestra, a theatre, a movie house, a stadium for sports, a museum, a library and a bookshop.
In Berat I visited a castle on top of a hill. People live within its walls in houses which have electricity and running water. The castle gallery contains a rare collection of paintings by artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Byzantine style. A manuscript from the sixth and one from the eighth century were discovered here. The church has authentic medieval decorations, paintings, a set of antique chairs, and a whole wall of gold-plated metal with scenes from the lives of Christ and his saints. From the castle I went to another national monument — the hall where the first People’s Congress had met in 1944. On the walls were enlarged photographs of delegates and copies of news items related to the Congress. Next I toured a large textile mill which employs over seven thousand workers who take pride in their self-reliance and devotion to innovative work. Just outside the main gate I saw pictures of exemplary workers selected for that month. The workers run several cultural and other programs for their welfare.
From Berat I headed for the museum-city of Gjirokastra on hilly roads which wind through hundreds and hundreds of terraced fields. Looking at mountain villages and their shops and libraries, I realized how their way of life has changed since World War II. Thousands of student volunteers have spent many weeks during their vacations and played a key role in clearing the mountainsides and making terraces, planting trees, digging canals and constructing the railway lines. In one section along the road I saw thousands of orange and olive trees planted by young students who had also dug a tunnel through a mountain to supply water for irrigation from a river on the other side. My interpreter told me that he had worked on this project as a student. As a result of these projects, some of the remote villages are turning into towns and gaining in population; the state is providing apartments, schools, and sports and cultural facilities for everyone. Their shops are stocked with the same goods sold in Tirana, and the difference between the urban and rural life is disappearing. Buses have connected these villages with the rest of the country.
Perched dramatically on the side of a hill, Gjirokastra impressed me as one of the most picturesque towns. From my hotel window I could see a vista of historic and new houses, apartments, schools, playgrounds and farms in the distance.
The first item on the itinerary in Gjirokastra was a quick drive to a Greek minority village in the district. I dropped in on their house of culture in which an amateur group was rehearsing songs and dances for a presentation in their 300-seat theatre. The building has a gallery for showing the work of local artists and also a dance hall. Then I walked across the road into a Greek farmer’s house. It is a private dwelling and has been expanded with state loans. Two brothers, their mother and their families reside here in the comfort they had not known before 1946. One of the brothers, who served me raki, spoke intensely of his youth in the 1930s, when everybody worked for a landlord who forced them to construct their small houses on the side of the mountain so that the level land could be reserved for farming. Tenants lived in poverty and did not have any facilities. Water had to be hauled in from a well two miles away. Many persons migrated to foreign lands. Now there is a prosperous collective farm, everybody is educated, and many of the new generation have become doctors, engineers, agronomists and teachers and returned there to practice their professions for the benefit of the district.
On my return to the city, I called on a teacher who has been honoured as the People’s Teacher, the only one from the local schools to get this distinction. He has taught in the gymnasium for over thirty years and written books for children. He gave me a history of the town and underlined its contribution to arts and letters, while his wife served raki, coffee and cake. He let me examine his volumes of Shakespeare translated into Albanian by Fan S. Noli and some of the translations of European writers. He told me that schools in his country stressed learning, moral education, national spirit and public service. Coming back to my hotel, I stepped into one of the bars where an amateur group played for an hour.
Early the next morning I got up to the castle which traces its history back to the sixth century and has been converted into a National Museum of Arms. Since the building was closed, I hurried over to the Institute for the training of elementary and middle school teachers, attended by five hundred students who live in a hostel. The Director invited me to his office to chat with a group of teachers and students. The Director spoke about their emphasis on learning, practical work and military duty in their system of education. Students have five hours of classes daily, and teachers are available to them in the afternoons for consultation and help in their academic work. Highly motivated to excel in their work, they belong to clubs and participate in extracurricular activities. They are quite curious about other countries and their writers. One girl was reading an Albanian translation of L. Hemon’s Maria Chapdelaine. Another had read some of Gabrielle Roy’s novels. Most of them had studied some Shakespeare in translation or in the original. Students discuss and criticize “alien manifestations” or social attitudes which reflect foreign influences. I asked for an example of this undesirable outlook, and one of the students immediately named “arrogance” and “immodesty.” These students are highly conscious of the political and social character of their society and culture in contrast with that of Yugoslavia, Soviet Russia and the United States. Their teachers were knowledgeable about their subjects and modest about their learning. The English teacher spoke fluently and idiomatically in English and served as an interpreter during our discussions.
I left the Institute with a sense that I was beginning to share their pride in the achievements of the students and their teachers. Next, I drove through steep and narrow streets to the Museum of the National Liberation War, built on the spot where Enver Hoxha’s birthplace had stood. The original house had burnt down in 1916 and a new one had been constructed in 1966 on the same model and furnished in the interior style of that day. The museum gives an outline of the phases of national liberation through panels of enlarged pictures, documents, weapons and other objects.
By this time I was getting tired of the rain, which had stayed with me since Durrës, and I welcomed the sun and warmth of Saranda on the Ionian Sea at the southwestern corner of the country. I took a long walk along the water and noticed groups of children playing in the parks, in backyards and along the streets. An incredible forty per cent of the country’s population is under the age of fourteen; their vitality enlivens every street. I also walked through different shops which sell books, clothes, jewellery, china, pots and pans, shoes — all produced by Albanians. Their prices depend on whether an item is a necessity or a luxury. A colour television set, for instance, is a luxury, a black-and-white one a necessity. Food is cheap and in plentiful supply. Meat is the main dish of each meal. Shoes and ready-made clothes for children are priced especially low. Cotton and wool are the most commonly used fabrics.
In the morning I decided to visit a holiday home for workers who spend two weeks there every two years. Presenting a gorgeous and panoramic view of the Ionian Sea, the home holds one hundred and forty-four guests (two beds in each room) and provides food and entertainment for them. Each district has homes of this type, and most workers, farmers and professionals go there for rest and recreation. These homes are also popular with the retirees; women retire at the age of fifty-five and men at sixty.
Albania’s early history is entwined with that of Greece, because the Greeks had settled many of the towns in antiquity. Hence I arranged a visit to Butrint, an excavation site of a town founded in the eighth century before Christ. The mythological Aeneas is supposed to have spent two days on this spot on his way from Troy to Italy to found Rome. Butrint was first a Greek colony and subsequently it had been ruled by the Romans, Byzantines, Venetians and Turks and was rebuilt numerous times. It is said to have been destroyed by an earthquake once in the fourth century. On top of the hill in the middle of the site lies a Venetian castle which serves as a museum for locally found columns, statues, glass jars, vases, tombstones, the heads of goddesses and people, and some stones with inscriptions. For me, the most interesting section was a 1,500-seat amphitheatre erected by the Greeks and altered by the Romans for their sports. A Roman wall surrounds the town with its Roman baths, homes, wells for water and a temple. Constructed on a slope with blocks of stone in a semi-circular shape typical of Greek theatres, each of the stones of the amphitheatre rests on the edge of the one below it. The first six rows have a line marking the front for seating and the back for the feet of the spectators on the row behind.
Returning from this expedition, I stopped for lunch in the village of Ksamil, established only twelve years back and complete with a cultural house, a school and a restaurant on the edge of the water. The farmers had planted a large quantity of oranges and grew wheat and vegetables too. They plough with tractors and transport their produce in trucks. I saw a group of elementary schoolchildren clearing the area of winter debris under the supervision of a teacher.
Back in Saranda, in the evening, I joined one of the district youth leaders for a drink in a bar and asked him questions about the responsibilities of youth committees. Anyone between 14 and 26 is a youth and becomes a member of these committees which organize dances and concerts, discussion groups, lectures and sports and coordinate the work of the youth in factories, farms and the army. Young people attend cultural events at farms and factories. These committees try to make leisure hours lively, exciting and meaningful and have curbed the use of drugs and liquor by the youth. I asked my host where most young people might be at seven that evening. They are walking along the water with friends, playing games at the house of culture, studying at home, watching television, practising music, rehearsing for a play or a music show. There is no particular prejudice against drinking raki or beer or other wines by young persons, but there was not a single youth in the bar we were in. Some adults may drink to excess, but I did not see any signs of heavy drinking in the bars I attended in various towns. The young people are serious about their studies and school work and conscious of their social and political responsibilities and their future prospects, because they live in a country which does not have any kind of un- or under-employment. The young and the old spend considerable amount of time reading books, magazines and newspapers.
During my drive back to Tirana, I observed the uniformity of industrial and other construction everywhere and thought that no district or region was being favoured at the cost of others and no national minority was being neglected. Each district council has to make sure that it develops its own economy in the best possible manner in accordance with its resources. There are no conflicts or animosities based on ethnic or regional differences. In education, too, there are no inferior and superior schools. Students in the mountains get as good an instruction as those in the urban areas. Each district committee selects candidates for the university and post-secondary institutes according to its economic and cultural needs so that the student body is not dominated by individuals from a few urban areas.
Although I did not have much time to observe the university in Tirana and to meet its students, I managed to have a short session with the Dean of Faculty of History and Philology and their teachers of French, English, Italian and other foreign languages. They teach literature in association with allied subjects like linguistics, stylistics, literary theory and history and philosophy. Students attend lectures and participate in discussion groups and seminars. They put a strong stress on scholarship and excellence in grades. Everybody should work hard and get high grades, according to the Dean. Those who study English go from Anglo-Saxon writings to the twentieth century and relate general trends in society to individual writers and their work. Their professors have prepared histories of English and American literature as well as their own anthologies. They write this material from the point of view of materialist philosophy and do not rely at all on the literary histories published in the British Isles or the United States or the Soviet Union. They apply the Albanian outlook on every subject they teach at the University of Tirana and its branches in other cities. There are over 12,000 students on the main campus, and they live in a complex of hostels. Founded in 1957, the Enver Hoxha University of Tirana has become a major centre of teaching and research in the arts and sciences and publishes a large amount of material in Albanian in medicine, engineering, physics, mathematics and the humanities and social sciences.
I also discussed methods of education with the Director of Pedagogy who explained to me their emphasis on socialist needs and ideals in teaching. Education should be imparted in a comprehensive manner; hence their syllabus combines moral, aesthetic and political instruction. They do not fragment a subject into hundreds of segments and do not present it in bits and pieces. Education at every level comprises academic work, productive labour and military training. The university does not encourage students to indulge in personal opinions or abstract learning.
The brevity of my stay made it difficult for me to call on writers and artists, but I was fortunate to hold a meeting with the Editor-in-Chief of a literary weekly. The Albanian Writers’ and Artists’ League had just held a seminar on raising the quality of writing and on opposing schematic and formulaic presentations of social reality. Writers should deal with real conflicts and issues instead of composing abstract sermons for and against a social or cultural problem. What are the tensions and problems in people’s lives in the 1980s? What is their sense of the past and the future? Writers should examine life in the process of change and development and deepen their readers’ awareness of social contradictions. Albania has produced a number of good fiction writers. Novelists, poets and playwrights often give public readings around the country, especially in October, which is designated the month of literature. These writers get monthly salaries from the state as well as royalty on the sale of their books. Young writers get help and advice from experienced ones, but they do not teach creative writing in the university.
With the spread of literacy and a strong publication record, this country has created an extensive library system. The Director of the National Library told me that Albania did not have any library before 1917. Founded by a few patriotic individuals in 1917, the central library held a total of only 15,000 volumes in 1944. The new government took up the National Library as an urgent problem and required copies of every publication to be deposited there. In 1987, the Library has over one million volumes in Albanian and other languages and operates about four thousand branches all over the country. Branch libraries borrow material from the National at the request of their readers. The staff of the National Library publishes indexes and bibliographical tools and guides of various types. It publishes an Albanian subject index every month and covers material about Albania in newspapers, magazines and books. The staff scans a number of foreign periodicals also for Albanian subjects. The state allocates funds to the National Library for buying books and serials from other countries. Hundreds of people use the reading rooms of the National Library every day.
As soon as I finished my conversation with the Director of the National Library, I left for the town of Korça. In the evening, I talked to the director of the local theatre, a lively and energetic man who had studied theatre and drama in Tirana. He was proud of the town’s position in drama and music, and a People’s Artist lives there. His troupe has performed Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Arthur Miller, and a number of French and Russian plays. The director had acted in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and his wife, an actress, had done such parts as Desdemona. The company produces quite a few plays by Albanian dramatists each year.
Korça holds a prominent position in the history of education in Albania, because the nation’s first elementary school opened here in 1887. Some of the photographs of early teachers and parties of students and other documents can be seen in the Museum of Education in the first school building. I should underline the horrible fact that very few Albanians got education of any kind before 1890, and there was no post-secondary instruction until after Liberation. Albania has in the short span of forty years moved from almost total illiteracy to universal literacy.
The National Museum of Medieval History is located in Korça and its most precious treasure is a set of fifteenth-century paintings in wood panels. It also contains models of houses as well as a number of stone pillars from the medieval period. I was fascinated by some of the intricately designed jewellery and the workmanship of weapons. An eighteenth-century carved panel from a church, with paintings, is another important item in this collection.
The National Museum is housed in an old church, and since religion does not exist in the country as an institution all the churches and mosques have been converted into houses of culture or museums. One of the historic mosques stands on a corner of Skanderbeg Square in Tirana. People have a profound hatred for religious and supernatural ideas which have always served the interest of oppressive regimes and supported ignorance and superstition. In view of this popular sentiment, the state has outlawed the practice of religion in any form.
On the evening of my last day in Tirana, I was able to spend an hour with Ismail Kadare, the country’s most outstanding writer, and asked him questions about the movement against schematic and formulaic depiction of social life in novels and plays. He said that the main difficulty with this type of writing is that it allows an artist to pretend to be progressive and forward-looking while he is obscuring and covering-up the nature of social conflicts in their society. One must observe life keenly and convey one’s impressions to the public in an elegant and realistic style. Kadare felt that the level of writing would not improve if readers did not express their dissatisfaction with the novels and poems being produced. Since everybody can buy and read books, writers have to meet people’s expectations by raising the quality of their work. If writers do not analyse and delineate properly the nature of tensions in Albanian culture, they are not very effective as artists.
In the evening I had a formal dinner with the head of the Albanian Committee for Friendship and was touched by his hospitality, gracefulness and courtesy. He reminded me again that I should judge his country’s achievements in economy and culture in relation to its poverty and backwardness in 1944. Some visitors comment unfavorably on the absence of cars and skyscrapers, I remarked, because they do not approve of the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production; they wish that there were exploitation and inequality in the country. It would be perverse to say that the country was poor because it did not have big cars and flashy nightclubs. I pointed out that the country’s greatest distinction is that it has done away with poverty and ignorance, it has freed its people from exploitation and private property, it has overcome unemployment and inflation, and it has made education and cultural opportunities available to everybody; it has reduced the gap between rural and urban areas, it has cut the differential of salaries in jobs, it has banished religion and nurtured scientific and democratic ideas, and it has defended itself against foreign plots and attacks.
The day I was flying out, I paid a quick visit to the Institute for Creative Arts and discussed how they taught acting and stage design. I spoke to my hosts and thanked them profusely for their impeccable hospitality. I told them that I felt disappointed that I could stay there only for eleven days; I expressed my hope that I would return to their country in the near future and learn more about its social and cultural progress.
Lord Byron was one of the first poets to travel to Albania and to applaud the freedom-loving spirit of its people. Albania has realized its dream of freedom, a dream that Byron had cherished and expressed through his poetry. I conclude my diary with Lord Byron’s homage:
Land of Albania! where Iskander rose,
Theme of the young, and beacon of the wise,
And he his namesake, whose oft-baffled foes
Shrunk from his deeds of chivalrous emprize:
Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
The cross descends, thy minarets arise,
And the pale crescent sparkles in the glen,
Through many a cypress grove within each city’s ken.
(The New Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, June/July 1987)
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