A once ‘Scary’ Albanian shrine now shines
Despised dictator’s memorial made over with view to future
TIRANA, Albania — Built in the 1980s to commemorate a dead tyrant in Pharaonic style, the concrete and glass pyramid in the center of Albania’s capital, Tirana, was falling apart by the time engineers and construction workers arrived to rescue it.
The windows were broken. Homeless people were sleeping in its cavernous hall, which was daubed with graffiti and stink of urine. Empty bottles and syringes littered the floor, which was covered in polished marble when the pyramid — a shrine to Albania’s late communist dictator, Enver Hoxha — first opened in 1988, but had since been stripped bare by vandals and thieves.
“The place was a wreck,” Genci Golemi, the site engineer, recalled of his first visit. “Everything had been stolen.”
Now, after two years of reconstruction work, the building is a glistening temple to Albania’s ambitious hopes for the future.
For Tirana’s mayor, Erion Veliaj, the $22 million makeover points to how he imagines the capital — as “the Tel Aviv of the Balkans,” a hightech hub offering jobs and promise to a country that was so impoverished and cut off from the modern world under Hoxha, who died in 1985, that typewriters and color TVS were banned.
“Instead of being a blast from the past, it will be blast off into the future,” the mayor said of the pyramid, brushing aside the fact that Albania is still one of Europe’s poorest countries and better known as a source of economic migrants than software engineers.
Still, after decades of failed grand plans for the pyramid, hope is running high. It is being repurposed as a space for classrooms, cafes and tech company offices, and is scheduled to open to the public this year.
“Hoxha will be rolling in his grave to see his memorial turned into a celebration of capitalism, jobs and the future,” Veliaj said, standing atop the pyramid, which is about 70 feet tall, near a hole in the roof that used to be filled with a giant red star made of glass. The outline of the star is still visible in the concrete that housed it, a ghostly reminder of Albania’s four decades under brutal communist rule.
Many countries on Europe’s formerly communist eastern fringe have wrestled with the question of what to do with massive structures left over from a past most people would like to forget.
Winy Maas, the principal architect of MVRDV, a Dutch firm that led the redesign of the Tirana pyramid, said that dealing with structures erected to celebrate tyranny has always involved “difficult decisions” but that demolition is “rarely a good option.”
He said he was inspired by the reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin by British architect Norman Foster, who added a glass dome to a building long associated with Germany’s Nazi past and turned it into a lightfilled symbol of the country’s modern democracy.
Albania was the last country in Europe to ditch communism, doing so in 1991 with a frenzy of attacks on statues of Hoxha, his memorial hall and everything he stood for.
But hopes of a new era of democratic prosperity quickly turned into yet more upheaval when a network of financial Ponzi schemes collapsed in 1997, setting off violent protests that pushed the country toward civil war.
Tempers eventually calmed, opening the way for Albania to apply to join the European Union in 2009, and win candidate status in 2014 for future entry to the bloc, which it has yet to join.
Throughout this turbulent journey, the Hoxha pyramid loomed over Tirana, slowly decaying and seemingly taunting each new Albanian government with its memories of a Stalinist system few wanted back but whose replacement had fed so much disappointment.
“The ghost of Hoxha was everywhere and terrifying for everyone,” recalled Frrok Cupi, a journalist who was appointed in 1991 to manage the pyramid, which was supposed to become a cultural center.
Over the years, the pyramid started falling apart, taken over by squatters and swarming with young people who used its sloping concrete outer walls as slides. Bold plans to give the structure a new purpose came and went, including a failed project promoted by Albania’s former prime minister, Sali Berisha, to turn the pyramid into a new national theater.