Life is War: Surviving Dictatorship in Communist Albania by Shannon Woodcock

Author:Shannon Woodcock [Woodcock, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HammerOn Press
Published: 2016-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Invisible Barriers - Liljana Majko

I returned to Tirana from Kukës to meet Eda’s parents, who had also spent their lives as teachers, first in the mountainous north and then in the south of Albania. Eda and I both lived in Ali Demi, the neighbourhood beside the Lana river on the foothills of Mount Dajti. My apartment was in one of the new concrete towers, painted pastel pink, that swayed through the regular earthquakes, and Eda lived on the top (fifth) floor of a communist-period apartment block. Until the 1970s, Ali Demi was composed of single-storey houses with gardens and fruit trees. Slowly responding to the housing crisis, the Party paved Ali Demi Road and lined it with apartment blocks built of porous brick, lightly rendered in now crumbling concrete. There were no elevators or central heating, although these apartments were primarily allocated to families with members in the Party. Now these apartment blocks sag under the weight of the huge plastic water tanks that people installed on the roofs in the 1990s to solve the problem of water being available for only a few hours every day.

Eda’s parents were visiting Tirana from their home in Delvina, Thoma’s hometown also, in Southern Albania. Turning into the stairwell of Eda’s apartment, I leapt the pools of water that leaked from a ground spring, and climbed the stairs, which broke off in fragments due to the inferior concrete used in their construction. Even these external stairwells were cleaned and decorated with rugs and rows of potted plants. At the fourth floor I paused for breath and to take in the view – the beautiful chaos of old Tirana homes below, only their tiled roofs visible from above, small terracotta islands surrounded by a leafy green ocean. This pocket of old Tirana was being encroached on all sides by brightly painted apartment blocks, and it is sad to know that the remaining gardens shaded with citrus trees and grape vines, built on thin and winding streets, will soon be destroyed by developers.

As usual, one of Eda’s neighbours spoke to me in the staircase. Eda came out to greet me and pointed down to her grandmother Nure’s house. Eda lived with her maternal grandmother here in Ali Demi throughout high school and university, and she often shared stories she’d heard from Nure about the times before she was born. When I met Nure myself, I asked her to tell me about her childhood in Albania during the 1930s under King Zog. Her personal brush with the monarchy was when the King’s bridal motorcade passed by their family home and small shop on the Tirana–Durres road in 1938. Queen Geraldine had been a blur of white lace in the scarlet Mercedes-Benz 540K that Hitler had given them as a wedding gift.

Nure married Idi Shaqja in 1951, then moved to Tirana to live with her new husband and his family. She still lives in the home where she raised her five children and some of her grandchildren.

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