Halfway down the Danube

And home again

So, back from Tirana.

Tirana is a very odd city. Nobody is quite sure how big it is; the best guess is around 700,000, but Albania hasn't had a census in a while. The collapse of Albanian Communism led to an exodus from the countryside to the cities, so it's definitely a bigger city than it was, and maybe bigger than it should be. The surprisingly nice city center is ringed by a lot of less nice Communist-era ugly concrete apartment blocks, which in turn is ringed by shantytowns and zoning-free zones of wild and random construction.

I said the city center was surprisingly nice. Couple of reasons. One, a fair chunk of central Tirana used to be off limits to the public. An area known as "the Block", about four or five blocks on a side, was reserved for the villas of Communist dictator Enver Hoxha and other high-ranking Party members. These villas were large and gracious, and surrounded by green lawns and lots of trees.

Well, the Block is no longer off-limits, but most of the villas are still there. Some have become restaurants or coffee shops; one is a cultural institute and English school. But they're still surrounded by lawns and trees.

Meanwhile, the rest of the downtown is marked by two or three great broad avenues from the Communist days, and a couple of huge squares, of the sort that used to have statues of Lenin and Stalin. The combination gives central Tirana a very funny look and feel.

The current Mayor of Tirana -- who's worth a post in his own right -- went on a determined cleanup spree a few years back. So, while the outskirts of the city remain a mess of bare cinderblocks, dirt streets, and shanties, the center has a couple of large green parks. (Also, oddly, a couple of parks that are bare dirt strewn with garbage -- sometimes just across the street.)

Then, for this summer, he went on a construction binge. (Which may be related to the national elections, which are just a few weeks away.) So, all over central Tirana, roads are being repaved, pipes laid, you name it. This is not always a good thing, as Albanian construction seems to be an intermittent and haphazard thing. Sidewalks are frequently punctuated by holes, from little 20-cm ankle breakers to gaping crevasses that can swallow the unwary pedestrian intact.

Further: Tirana is by far the biggest city in Albania, and the downtown is the place to be. So, traffic is incredible, and the sidewalks are always full of people... especially in the evenings, when it seems like every Albanian between the age of 18 and 30 hits the streets of central Tirana.

I haven't even mentioned the occasional bizarrely painted buildings (and I mean bizarre... like the one that was painted in wavy horizontal bands of six or seven different colors). Or the huge drainage ditch down the middle of the largest avenue. It's a very odd place, but I don't know if y'all are really interested in urban design. Or, well, urban non-design. Anyway.

There are a lot of shaven-headed young men driving Mercedes sedans while talking on their cell phones. Albania is supposed to be the stolen car center of Europe. A casual stroll around central Tirana suggests that this is entirely plausible. There are a lot of BMWs and Mercedes. (The high end Volkswagon models are also popular.)

The food is OK. Pizza is extremely popular in Tirana. I ate a lot of pizza. There are little "burek" stands every 100 meters or so.

It's a cafe culture town. Much more like Belgrade than Bucharest, in this regard. Probably seven cafes or coffee shops for every restaurant. Everybody spends a lot of time sitting in outdoor cafes, seeing and being seen.

I liked it. It was dusty and, in April, already getting hot. There were piles of garbage and a lot of beggars. And once you leave the nice city center, the ugliness and poverty quotients go way up. But I liked it anyway.

Posted by douglas at May 1, 2005 08:11 PM