Sadly it’s time for my final post on Albania’s fascinating capital, so let’s go out with a bang! I want to explore the legacy of Enver Hoxha through a series of photographs I took in and around The Pyramid of Tirana, or simply The Pyramid to locals. These pictures also document my first true “Urban Exploration” (urbex) experience, which introduced me to a whole new subculture of travelers. Get ready to take a tour through Tirana’s greatest enigma in a city chock full of them: The Pyramid.
What to do with the legacy of a dictator
Enver Hoxha acted as a totalitarian dictator in the communist state of Albania from 1945 until his death in 1985. Pranvera Hoxha, Enver’s daughter, as well as her husband, were both architects and they wasted no time designing The Pyramid, which originally housed the Enver Hoxha Museum, a tribute to her late father.
Pranvera, who is quoted as saying, “the animals woke up,” in reference to the uprisings against the communist party in the early 1990s, broke some of her father’s strictest rules herself when constructing his namesake museum. Most notably she imported white marble from the United States and covered the entire building with the glistening stone pieces. (The marble was removed in 1996 and is being stored at an undisclosed location in Tirana.)
Construction was completed in 1988 and the museum opened to the public exactly three years after Hoxha’s death. The exhibits glorified Pranvera’s father and presented him as the Albanian savior. For a man who had outlawed religion in his own country, he was certainly being deified in death.
The museum’s lifespan was rather short. Revolution was on the horizon and by 1991 student protests in nearby Skanderberg Square had closed the museum for good. After Albania declared itself a democratic nation, the building was rechristened “The Pyramid” and the name has stuck ever since.
The 1990s were a turbulent time for The Pyramid. The local government morphed the museum into a convention center before allowing it to be purchased by a private citizen and rechristened a glitzy a nightclub. In 1999, at the height of the Kosovo War between Serbia and Kosovo, NATO forces took control of The Pyramid and used it as a base to end the violence of the Yugoslav Wars.
The Pyramid Today
After NATO cleared out, The Pyramid fell into disrepair. The interior was ransacked and the outer shell was slowly covered in graffiti and street art. A local TV and radio station have taken over the offices in the rear of the former museum, but the rest of the building has sat idle since the turn of the 21st Century.
Over time, The Pyramid became a popular student hangout; the University of Tirana is a mere ten minutes away by foot. A favorite activity is to climb up the steep sides of The Pyramid and have a beer at the top. (For the record, I attempted to join them one evening, but it just wasn’t going to happen for me. I’m super impressed with anyone who can make it to the top without wiping out and sliding back down again.)
I was told that the genuinely tricky part wasn’t crawling up The Pyramid, but rather inching your way back down. I witnessed students assuming a crab-like position and then sort of waddling their way down the runway to the bottom.
In addition to after school shenanigans, The Pyramid has also become the hot spot for student protests, calling for swifter change and greater reforms. Most recently, young Albanians have been assembling to demand stronger rights for the gay community, including legalizing gay marriage and providing stronger safeguards for gay couples trying to adopt and start families. I asked one of the students why the graffiti supporting gay rights was written in English and not Albanian. He told me it was better to write it in English because then it might be picked up by the foreign press and gain greater worldwide attention than if it had been written in Albanian.
The Future of the Pyramid
In 2011, the city government announced it was going to demolish The Pyramid as it was built to glorify Hoxha and stood as a derelict reminder of a painful period in Albanian history. It’s logical to assume that this would have been met with much rejoicing, but in reality the opposite happened. The citizens of Tirana signed petitions by the thousands to save The Pyramid. Yes, it was a symbol of the communist era, but it had become a part of Tirana as well- one that people weren’t prepared to do without. The outcry was so overwhelming that city leadership knew it would be political suicide to carry on with The Pyramid’s destruction.
A compromise was finally reached and instead of tearing down the structure, it will be refurbished and turned into a sleek contemporary art center that will showcase the best of Albania’s next generation of artists. Of great importance was that students will still be allowed to hang out on the roof and have a beer after class. Covid-19 may have thrown a wrench into the timeline, but the new center was slated to open in 2021.
Urban Exploration (Urbex)
If you hang out in a hostel common room long enough, you’ll start to see patterns emerge as to why people travel. Some want to party; some want to experience different cultures; others simply are taking a break from life and trying to find themselves. And then there those who are on a mission. These people are traveling with a specific purpose and goal in mind. People in this group include those trying to collect a passport stamp from every country in the world or those attempting to visit every UNESCO site. In Tirana, I encountered some Urban Explorers (Urbex-ers as they call themselves) and was able to peek inside their travel subculture.
Urbex is a community of travelers who wish to visit abandoned buildings all over the world. There are databases of these landmarks on the web with tips on ways to visit them legally (and sometimes illegally). Urbex-ers are thrill seekers, interested in the past and its faded beauty. I can certainly understand the allure: I have spent many hours tracking down rundown former-Soviet buildings in the Caucuses and Baltic countries, but I only viewed these decaying giants from the outside. The Pyramid, which one can legally enter and explore, was my first true Urbex experience.
I’m going let my photos do the talking as I got to visit the Enver Hoxha Museum almost thirty years after it shuttered. While I’m thrilled at the prospect of Tirana opening a new contemporary art center in the space, I’m a bit melancholy that others won’t be able to have this same Urbex experience that I did. The citizens didn’t want The Pyramid torn down. They wanted people to be able to go inside because this is the ultimate symbol of Hoxha’s legacy. The temple that was erected to glorify him has been trashed. Garbage fills the halls and every scrap of metal and copper wiring has been savagely ripped out of the walls, as if the people were finally getting a tiny piece of compensation for the suffering they endured. This is Hoxha’s comeuppance and to alter the building takes away from that a bit.
Kambana e Paqes (Bell of Peace)
In 1997, the Bell of Peace monument was unveiled in front of The Pyramid, functioning as a capstone that symbolized a reconciled Albania. The eponymous bell was formed by melting down bullets and shell casings fired during the protests in the 1990s. The metal projectiles, once used with the intention of deadly force, now peal out with a call for peace whenever the bell is tolled. It’s no coincidence that this monument was placed next to The Pyramid. Like the bullets that have been transformed into a bell, The Pyramid has metamorphosed from a museum exalting a dictator to a building that mocks his memory.
In my first post, I wrote that Tirana would need to slowly reveal bits of itself over time, and perhaps this was the city’s grand finale; rather than handing over the answer sheet, in true Albanian fashion, I was left with a thirst to learn more. Every answer leads to five more questions, with the most interesting being, “What happens next? Where does Tirana go from here?”
