Bunkers in Albania
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Since forever: Ruled by ottoman empire
...along comes the 20th century...
1912: We declare independence!
1914: Let's pick a king...
1925: Let's pick a new king...
1939: I guess the Italians are king now...
1944: Communism, we're all kings!
1946: Hoxha is the king of kings
1997: one more time and without pyramid schemes[1]
2009: nato
2014: official eu candidate
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania
Fun fact about World War II Albania: pretty much uniquely, especially in the region (Yugoslavia had a death rate of over 80 percent, with some regions having death rates closer to 90 percent[1][2][3]) they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-los...
[2] Technically Montenegro had a death rate of 93 percent, but in practice that was 28 out of 30 Jews, so I'm not counting them.
[3] Long digression: That was not the worst, by the way. The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them, and killed many of the survivors who tried to return home. A quick estimate, putting Poland's death rate at even 80% and 3 million Jews, means that if you said 'death rate for Europe except for Poland', i.e., pretending Poland wasn't in Europe, the overall death rate drops to 40%. Without that, i.e., including Poland, it is at 66%. All six death camps were located in Poland. They were 10% Jewish before the war and roughly 0.02% of it today even by generous estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#B...). By literally any measure--even the most generous possible for Poland and least generous for others--all three of their total population (10,000), percent of the world Jewish population (0.048) and numbers per million Poles (267) are lower (or equal to) than those for such famously Jewish countries as Panama, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, or Mexico. If you're ever told you're going to be teleported to some German-occupied country in World War Two as a Jew, don't pick Poland.
That is perhaps an interesting fact. But not really a fun one.
Wow, that was done by Poles in Poland? How did that happen? Certainly the whole nation had to be behind this? [0]
>some German-occupied country in World War Two
Ah, the bare minimum mention at the end.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_Among_the_Nations#Nu...
That and I fear most people really don’t have any principles when push comes to shove.
You want a boy scout that focuses more on the group than the ideals.
I doubt that that was constitutional, but maybe it was, after all they got in power legally in 1933.
> The recently completed Kraft durch Freude cruise ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was anchored in international waters near the United Kingdom to serve as a floating polling station for German and Austrian citizens living in the UK. On 10 April 1938, 1,978 voters (including 806 Austrians) were ferried from Tilbury, east of London.
Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust is really interesting (although pretty heavy going - I didn't finish it) on how bureacracy enabled the Holocaust by reducing it to a long line of people taking orders from their superiors and giving orders to their subordinates so they could compartmentalise their actions to inputs and outputs, until it got to the people who actually carried out the atrocities, which even the Nazis realised not everyone could do.
There's also a great book called transcript by Heimrad Bäcker, where he uses cut-up bits of the bureacracy (as it sounds like you'll know, the Nazis were sticklers for record-keeping) of the Holocaust in a kind of poetic form, where sometimes the things are identifiable, such as numbers of clothing items taken from people at the extermination camps, and others are just lists of numbers or words leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps.
Those bunkers are absolutely everywhere, even right in the middle of nowhere (I guess that's useful if you happen to get lost in the wilderness while hiking).
In towns and cities they have been sometimes repurposed, e.g. I remember seeing that someone created a small cafe on the beach using one of the larger bunkers.
The problem with reusing them is that the vast majority of the bunkers are of the smaller type (mostly below ground level, and on the inside there is barely enough room for a couple of people) and it's hard to find a new purpose for those.
Suicide booth
In 2009 I tried to go there with a friend on a motorcycle trip, but we were unable to get in the country due to language barrier, I don't know what was wrong. So we went to Ohrid instead.
The locals had painted the domes in bright colours as a sort of added tourist attraction.
A Minister (maybe Defense? Army? whatever) went to check the new bunkers. They looked good but he asked to the chief engineer how he could be sure that Hoxha would be satisfied with them.
"You know, if he thinks they are not good I'm dead."
"They are very good."
"So you must get in. We will shell the bunker and check if it's really as good as you say."
The engineer was not happy with that but the choice was between getting in or die immediately. He got in and they shelled the bunker all day long. The bunker survived, the engineer eventually recovered from the experience (temporary deafness and other problems) and the Minister could bet his own life on those bunkers.
Somewhat related: Famous Russian urbex photographer Lana Sator is still stuck in Albania, after being arrested for espionage while documenting Albania's abandoned cold war military infrastructure: https://archive.is/o7rgB
For what it's worth, she is a well known photographer. I've been following her work since the early 2010s.
Incredible.
From the point of view of the Russian side, imagine if Ukraine was littered with these bunkers, all of them filled with drone operators. I would say that this would be an upgrade on what Ukraine has with the trenches they have been building in the East since 2014.
A lone bunker is incredibly difficult to resuply, relieve, or reinforce. That is the power of trenches. They give protection for when you need to move goods, people, or information. If you can cut a defensive position off from any of these, it won't stand up very long.
You can still use such positions to delay. But Ukraine needs to hold territory, not delay it's loss.
A bunker, by itself, is not much of a defense. It kinda advertises the defender position. Without writing a paper on the subject, the short version is that they're useful as part of a defensive plan, occupied by troops trained in their use.
Having a random bunker, unsupported, in the middle if nowhere is not useful from a defensive point of view.
There's the commonly shared story about them that it turned out soldiers can't shoot from the smaller ones without going deaf, even when using ear protection.
I don't know if it's true or not, but having been in one of them, it seems likely. A concrete dome is pretty much the perfect shape to reflect all the sound waves right back at you.
I don't see a goal of your comment.
More significantly they can be used in attack as well as defense.
That doesn't make them pointless, it makes their use cases narrow. Hence a coffee shop in one of them.
Which can be a point. What do you do if you're a foot soldier and such a bunker is on your way? First, you stop. Maybe your platoon tries to find a way around it, maybe you call reinforcements (direct fire) to take it out, maybe you set up a heavy machine gun to suppress it while you cross it. But all of this takes time, which is one of the main purposes of such defensive structures - to slow the enemy down. Interestingly, such a bunker will partially work in this role even if it's unoccupied, since making sure it is in fact empty will still take time. Now consider that there's almost a million of such bunkers slowing you down. You also have to consider the era, today they'd be an easier target than in the 1970s.
Assuming they were actually all manned and able to provide interlocking fire as designed (a large assumption) - there would be no moving left or right. There would simply be another bunker or three in your next chosen path.
I've also visited one interwar Czechoslovak fortification complex, and these were completely different beasts with an elaborate design (network of connected fortifications, vast underground spaces/infrastructure...). But they were also much more expensive to build than the rudimentary Albanian designs.
Got a pointer/URL ? Sounds interesting. Czech design always stands out.
Sadly it was never used. Czechoslovak politians just decided to give up to Hitler
"I think you will find it's a bit more complicated than that".
Sir is falling into the trap (alarmingly common in the USA) of simplifying history to the point of meaninglessness. Indeed, you would do well to understand why the UK and France ceased their support for Bohemia in an act of appeasement; an act that certainly wasn't taken lightly and was itself done for complex reasons, partly arising from the trauma of the Great War that was still fresh in many minds.
This is the secondary point of a fortification (unless something has drastically changed since I was taught these matters).
There was also communication lines, (hard telephone lines), in ditches about 1m deep, in order to survive nuclear / emp attacks.
When I was a little kid, we'd play hide and seek in those bunkers, or we'd play 'castle take over' with self made wooden swords, romans vs illyrians as kids. (Or Albanians vs Turks). Which team conquered the most bunkers, would win.
They were fun as a kid, but we had to watch out for wild animals (or snakes), take refuge on those bunkers.
Now most of them are being scraped, to recoup the metal, so there are few left.
So, you are really seeing the 1/3rd left. The bunker built out during communism, was truly crazy.
(That's a serious question, why are conditions different now?)
This sounds like a political-economic analog of AIs consuming AI slop.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_in_...
I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro).
Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc...
The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania.
Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state.
So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc.
But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans...
Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.
I found that many people think positively of the regime and its dictator. The population was ill-equipped to deal with a market economy when the regime fell, and many Albanians believe the country has gone down a very chaotic path. They thought the dictatorship provided more structure. My grandmother-in-law (in her 60s), whose family suffered greatly when Hoxha took over, is one such Albanian who thinks positively of him, despite how the regime treated them. This feels a bit like Stockholm syndrome.
I swear to god, we could liberate North Korea and they'd turn around and cry about how good it was during the Kim era because apparently we humans are deeply masochistic to our core. We want the boot stomping on our face forever.
If you liberate DPRK and the South Koreans march in, "legitimately" buy up all the land and property and "fairly" put all the poor inhabitants into functionally perpetual indentured servitude there will eventually be some resentment.
But let's not forget that the Americans completely levelled the territory, including destroying dams that provided people's drinking water (a war crime then and now), and then gloated about it, and have then proceeded to consistently act in bad faith.
So when the comment above talks about "liberating" I do wonder exactly what they mean and how it would be different to the first time they tried it and how might the average North Korean react.
Maybe they would install a new dictator more amenable to the "rules-based international order" (i.e. the US and people who agree with them) like they did in South Korea or countless other countries across Latin America.
North Korea were destroyed in the Korean War. S3 Sources - Blowback https://search.app/8ZBidRZFnNxnWUcG9
I don't think it's too hard to figure out why the US has worked closely with the South Korean for decades. They're anti Communist.
But once the various dictatorships, be it the USSR, Yugoslavia, Hoxha or whoever, fell... it became clear that it would take a long time until their life materially improved other than not having to be afraid of getting gulaged randomly. Corruption continued to exist on all levels from small (police "roadblocks" with made-up traffic violation tickets) over middle (building permits taking years if not "accelerated" with bakshish) to large (to this day, most government-owned companies are looted by the elites), cost of life expenses for everything not produced domestically can be on par with Western countries... it's not much in visible improvement over the "old days" where you could at least survive as long as you kept your mouth shut.
I went there about ten years ago, walking across the border on a small road from Macedonia. The Macedonia border office was small but tidy. Then there was a 100m no man's land, then a Welcome to Albania sign that was full of bullet holes, and a table of Albanian border guards drinking and playing cards. Super friendly guys.
We walked about 5km into the local town, passing tons of these bunkers. Nearly every single car and truck that passed us was a Mercedes, except for the police cars which were tiny battered Fiats.
Can confirm the people we met were incredibly friendly, and the place felt very welcoming and nothing happened to make me feel unsafe.
However, I have heard some crazy stories from another friend who travelled there more extensively that make me think, while it's a relatively safe country as a tourist, it won't be uneventful if you stay there a while, especially if you get off the normal tourist track.
Given that most of the stereotypes I'd heard about Albania up to that point were "bunkers, lawlessness, and Mercedes but lovely people", I'd say that it absolutely did live up to these. However, a lot can change in a decade so maybe it's different now. Or maybe we just went to different parts of the country.
Albania has an (upper) middle class as well, so surely there are some new ones as well.
What was your favorite Albanian dish?
For food I really suggested a restaurant called Oda, not far from Skanderberg square in Tirana: it's a traditional Albanian house where you can taste all the Albanian dishes.
You can visit Bunk’Art in Tirana and then take the cable car up the mountain afterwards.
Lamar Tirana had some incredible sea bass.
Odas Garden is frequently recommended for local food to tourists but I found it to be overpriced and the dishes were way overcooked, but YMMV. The atmosphere is pretty unique. There are far better small time restaurants around for local cuisine (can’t remember the names).
My fav dish was Lakror, but it can be hit or miss in Tirana.
Do the free walking tour in the main square / Skanderbeg square.
There are bakeries everywhere, getting up early and walking down to the nearest bakery and getting fresh coffee and a pastry / burek and walking a bit in the sun is such a good way to start the day.
And I second the suggestion to go to Himare, we went via Vlore along the coast and down to Himare. They’ve built a new tunnel, I highly recommend avoiding it (I've heard it's closed now for final works anyway) and going over the mountain, there’s an amazing view point next to Mt Cika.
Get up to Montenegro if you can if you love scenic drives.
My only direct interactions with Albanians here was a restaurant I used to go to regularly in London which was run by Albanians, who were all lovely and recommended books by Ismail Kadare, particularly The General of the Dead Army, which I thought was wonderful.
[0] Rather like the philosophical game "All crows are black, but not all black birds are crows" I have a feeling this may be due to a majority of illegal drug networks being run by Albanians, even though a large majority of Albians in the UK have no involvement in it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_mafia
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-inside-story-of-europes-...
[2] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/albania-dr...
Albanians gratitude to the USA continues beyond Woodrow Wilson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_Boulevard
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_Boulevard#/media/...
That's why I wrote what I did: passive acceptance of a Führer's insanity leads to the kind of Stalinist nightmare that the Soviets experienced last century. (Yeah, I'm blending dictators: this scenario seems to be common to them all, throughout history.)
Such behavior needs to be put down immediately, with a bullet to the head. I guarantee those soldiers were better armed than that POS dictator.
Do I sound angry? Why, yes, I am. We need more individuals, not slaves.
"I remember in the 11th grade during an English lesson, we discussed how Freud’s student saved him and literally bought him out from the Nazis. At that time, my teacher (she was a child of the war) said one strange phrase: “War divides people into humans and non-humans.” Thirty years later, I can say how right you were." (https://x.com/tatyanaodesssa/status/1880920634978386335)
Albania was even within eastern communist block considered utter shithole run by mad paranoid guy. Well, he certainly was.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enver_Hoxha#Political_repressi...
I may be wrong, but just across the northern border of Albania, things may have already been very different. Every time I visit a country of the former Yugoslavia, I get the feeling that Josip Broz Tito (the de-facto dictator of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1980) is still respected, even idolized by some. As a German, this always surprises me, because the leader(s) of Eastern Germany (Ulbricht and Honecker) are today mostly ridiculed as bureaucrats without a trace of charisma. Tito certainly was an interesting character, and was the only leader of the communist block to challenge the leadership of Stalin. Again, I really have no first-hand experience and may be wrong, but my parents regularly traveled through Yugoslavia (mostly through today's Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro) in the 70ies and 80ies. They mostly stayed in cheap private holiday apartments, often eating dinner / breakfast with the owner families, and didn't get the impression that this was a particularly bad place to live in. AFAIK, it was also pretty straightforward for citizens of the former Yugoslavia to leave the country / travel to the West (at least this was explained to us by an older woman in Croatia who had traveled through France as a student in the 70ies to learn the language).
Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.
My best friend for a while in elementary school was a girl from an Albanian refugee family. Even she, an eight-year old, had only scary things to tell about Albania, mostly told to her by her parents and grandparents I guess.
That everything went to shit around the time that Tito declined and died (though correlation is not necessarily causation), does much to explain the nostalgia that you will still occasionally meet. However, that nostalgia has been challenged in recent decades through the wars and their aftermath. Serbian, Croatian, and Kosovar nationalism regard, for different reasons, Tito’s pan-Yugoslav project as inimical to their respective national interests, and nationalist rhetoric has a firm grip on many sectors of local media.
Why does “A Guide to the Serbian Mentality by Momo Kapor” say that they were not permitted to travel internationally?
And Tito was no ordinary dictator, it would be interesting to see how he would navigate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Traveling of whole family with small child was seemed risky due to possibility of family escaping to the west. Heck, we couldn't travel easily even within bloc itself.
0: the other side of the Kolmogorov option is that you want your geniuses silent
As for going away, the demographic picture for both countries is horrific. China is in a recession and the one thing they need to do is the one thing Xi is diametrically opposed to and he calls all the shots.
https://www.chinabankingnews.com/p/xi-wants-to-create-a-nati...
The Central Economic Work Conference is a CCP event where they announce the current direction of the Chinese economy for the year, and is headed by Xi.
And that's a key piece of the current 5 year plan. The CCP is actively executing on converting the Chinese economy to more of a consumption based economy.
What year are you living in!
China hasn't been a communist state since before I grew pubes.
They are an authoritarian state certainly; one that encourages capitalism to grow its economy.
I say this as first child out of revolution days that ended a dictorship, and sees the rise of such parties.
If you get noticed the future might not turn out well for you.
Now this was not Balkans but it is always startling how fundamentally inhumane and atomized all Communist societies are, in very much the same way. Am convinced one could transplant a Cuban to Romania or a Bulgarian to North Korea and save for the language and cuisine they'd instinctively know how the things work. How you should get hold of your groceries, when it's a good idea to bribe, who is important in informal way, what you shouldn't say and just how much effort you should put into your work. This was truly global, Borg-like culture like nothing before.
Their language is unique in Europe and probably originates in the Thrakian, Illyrian, and Dacian languages. With the important mention that one must not apply today's assumptions of a unified language when referring to something as "Dacian", think more of a situation like in today's Dagestan, where on a surface of 50,000 square kilometers, 3 million people speak no less than 40 languages.
The theory is that during the Roman retreat from Dacia, the population (estimated to as low as 100,000 and as high of 500,000 people, so not exactly a Biblical exodus), migrated to south of Danube and eventually today's location. The toponymy is strangely Albanian, like even the name of the Romanian capital "Bucharest" means "beautiful is" in Albanian.
This is a pretty good explanation
While Romanian bucur ‘happy’ and Albanian bukur ‘beautiful’ are indeed regarded as shared lexicon of disputed etymology, București (Bucharest) does not mean ‘beautiful is’ in Albanian: -ești is a common toponym-forming suffix in Romanian. It’s certainly not related to the Albanian copula, which is âshtë with a nasal vowel both historically and in many dialects still today (standard Albanian është is based on the Tosk variety that lost nasal vowels a few centuries ago).
* (For HN readers unaware of Balkan quarrels, a cornerstone of Romanian nationalism is the idea that the Romanians are descendants of a Romanized population in Dacia who remained behind when the province was lost to the Roman Empire. This would, crucially, allow the Romanians to have been in Transylvania before the Hungarians, longtime rivals for that land, arrived in 896 CE. That Romanian and Albanian share lexical material from the early first millennium is awkward for that view – many linguists internationally have concluded that the Romanian language was brought to modern day Romania from somewhere across the Danube. Romanian pop-sci, in order to save the Dacian continuity theory, therefore occasionally makes the claim that the Albanians came from the territory of Romania, or that the Albanian and Dacian languages were related.)
That's some weaselly wording conflating "opinion" and "proof".
There are some words that are the same in Albanian and Romanian, but very few. The languages are very different, Romanian is mostly based on Latin with Turkish, Slavonic and Polish influences (some Ukrainian also in Bucovina), the Dacian part is really small and the Albanian seems to be based on Illyrian dialects.