The journey
The world's most isolated communist state — its bunkers, its paranoia, and its extraordinary aftermath.
Between 1944 and 1985, Enver Hoxha built the most extreme communist state in history. He broke with Stalin, broke with Khrushchev, broke with China — eventually declaring Albania the world's first atheist state and sealing it off from the outside world entirely. He built 750,000 concrete bunkers across a country of 3 million people. One for every four citizens.
This tour follows the biographical and ideological arc of Hoxha's Albania: from the Tirana pyramid he built for himself (now a youth cultural centre), to his birthplace in Gjirokastër, to the BunkArt museums inside the bunkers he ordered constructed, to the extraordinary landscape of a country that spent 45 years sealed off and is now one of the most hospitable places in Europe.
The route ends in Ohrid — across the North Macedonian border — at the Ilinden Spomenik, the extraordinary brutalist memorial to the 1903 anti-Ottoman uprising. Two totalitarianisms, two memorials, one landscape.
Day by day
The itinerary
Albania — Tirana
Tirana — Pyramid and Bunker
Two days in the capital: the Pyramid of Tirana, built as Hoxha's mausoleum and now taken over by skateboarders and graffiti artists. BunkArt 1 — the 5-storey nuclear bunker beneath Mount Dajti, converted into a museum of the Sigurimi secret police. BunkArt 2 in the city centre. The Blloku neighbourhood, once forbidden to ordinary Albanians — now the best café quarter in the Balkans. A welcome dinner in the old city.
Albania — Durrës & Berat
Durrës & Berat — Roman to Ottoman to Communist
Durrës: the Adriatic port city with a Roman amphitheatre in the backyard of a residential neighbourhood, the largest in the Balkans. Then east to Berat: the UNESCO-listed city of a thousand windows, its Ottoman houses stacked up the hillside in an arrangement unchanged since the 17th century. The Onufri museum inside the castle — icon painting that predates the communist assault on religion.
Albania — Gjirokastër
Gjirokastër — The Stone City, Hoxha's Birthplace
Gjirokastër: the UNESCO city of slate-roofed towers and cobbled streets, birthplace of Enver Hoxha and of novelist Ismail Kadare, whose autobiographical novel "Chronicle in Stone" describes growing up here during the Second World War. Hoxha's childhood house. The castle's permanent display of a crashed American spy plane — a relic of Cold War incursions that the regime never forgot.
Albania — Sarandë & Butrint
Butrint — Ancient City, Communist Legacy
Butrint: a Greek and then Roman city built on a lagoon, inhabited for 2,500 years, abandoned in the Middle Ages and then sealed off by the communist regime — which, paradoxically, preserved it perfectly. UNESCO World Heritage. The theatre, the baptistery with its extraordinary mosaic floor, the silence of a site almost entirely free of tourists.
North Macedonia — Ohrid
Ohrid — Ilinden Monument
Across the border to Ohrid, with a stop at the Ilinden Spomenik at Kruševo: the abstract brutalist structure commemorating the 1903 anti-Ottoman uprising, designed by Jordan and Iskra Grabul and one of the finest monument buildings in the former Yugoslav space. Then into Ohrid — farewell dinner by the lake.
