‘Where are you from?’ someone called out from behind as we strolled down the Boulevardi Fan Noli in Korçë, a provincial town in the east Albanian mountains famous for its Old Bazaar, museum of medieval icons and brewery. Wearily we turned, suspicious of touts or beggars like the poverty-stricken Sinti and Roma we had encountered earlier that day outside the old mosque.
An elderly man caught up with us. He was solidly built with a trimmed moustache, wearing neat and clean clothes that looked like they had been purchased a couple of decades ago. Looking too well to be begging, he also did not project the brash, confident demeanour of a professional seller. In his hands he carried a tattered white plastic bag which contained a thick, old-fashioned photo album, bound in black embossed cardboard, the edges of the covers frayed from use.
‘Can I show you something?’ he asked in heavily accented, halting English.
He placed the album on a low retaining wall separating the footpath from a small grassy area with some shrubs and opened it. The first page showed black-and-white photos of a wedding. Taken in an ornate ballroom with the groom in a tuxedo and the bride in a fashionable 1920s gown, the pictures exuded middle-class affluence. ‘My parents’, the old man said. Other photos showed a hotel lobby, Doric columns, a seaside café. The honeymoon, we assumed.
He turned the page. There were pictures of a conductor in front of a small orchestra, the kind one expects to play in spa towns, and a hand-coloured promotional profile shot of a young man holding a violin—unmistakably our companion. ‘I used to play the violin’, he said and moved on to the next page.
In the right-hand corner, another picture of him, but in a very different pose. Dressed in a kind of army fatigues, he stood in a dusty, barren landscape, possibly a quarry, looking directly at the camera, exhausted. Diagonally opposite was a picture of a woman with a bob-like haircut, sitting on a low sofa with her legs drawn up and wearing a pleated, knee-length tartan skirt.
His attempts at explaining became more urgent, more desperate as he grappled with his limited English, trying to grasp words that were important but that eluded him. ‘Army? Soldier?’ we asked. He shook his head and replied: ‘Fifteen years’. ‘Camp?’ I prompted. ‘Yes, camp!’ he confirmed, relieved to have chanced upon the correct term, and then repeated for emphasis: ‘Fifteen years’.
Only a week before we had visited a museum in the capital Tirana, located in a large bunker complex, which detailed the persecution of Albanians by their own communist government. During the reign of Stalinist strongman Enver Hoxha, thousands upon thousands were imprisoned for perceived ideological crimes that often consisted of nothing more than having what was then termed the ‘wrong class background’.
Albania, a small country on the southern Balkan peninsula wedged between northern Greece in the east and Italy in the west across a narrow stretch of the Adriatic Sea, has in many ways been a microcosm of the European totalitarian experience in the twentieth century. Emerging from the Ottoman Empire, it became a monarchy between the two World Wars, then was occupied first by Mussolini’s fascists and later by Germany’s Nazis before the victory of anti-fascist partisans in 1944 and over four decades of orthodox communist rule.
The country reappeared from its North Korean-style seclusion in 1991, only to descend into civil-war-like unrest a few years later after its first experiments with capitalism caused many of its citizens to lose their possessions in government-endorsed Ponzi schemes made possible by weak banking laws initially introduced on advice from the International Monetary Fund.
I was reminded of the encounter in Korçë while watching a recording of the latest Walter Benjamin Lectures on Moral Socialism delivered by Lea Ypi, the British-Albanian philosopher and professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, to a packed auditorium at the Centre of Social Critique at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Ypi’s philosophical project is about liberating the concept of socialism from the wrongs of the vanished state socialism and turning it into a moral project that connects Kantian ideas of enlightenment with Marxism to ‘explain the pathologies of unfreedom’. She is in a unique position to critique the ‘immoral socialism of the twentieth century’ as well as ‘the complete tragic failure of capitalism’, having experienced the collapse of both political systems first-hand while growing up in the Albanian port city of Durrës—an experience she movingly recounts in her 2022 memoir, Free.
What made me think of the encounter in Korçë was that in her first lecture, Ypi told the story of her grandfather, a French-educated Albanian lawyer who was also sentenced to fifteen years in prison for ‘spreading propaganda and false ideology’. Despite this experience, he remained a socialist and continued to write about ‘the centrality of history in connection to political events’.
Back in Korçë, our companion turned to the other photo on the page. ‘My wife’, he proclaimed. ‘After…’ he again pointed at the photo of himself in the prison camp, ‘she died’. He gestured a fall and added. ‘Fourth floor. She jumped’. For a moment he seemed lost in himself while we mumbled our sympathies.
Then he snapped out of it and continued his story, flicked through the remaining pages of the album, now containing colour photos of what looked like family gatherings. ‘Not important’, he muttered. ‘Not important’.
‘But now, is it better?’ I asked. ‘More democracy, more freedom?’
He shrugged. ‘Different name, same ideology’. He stabbed the previous page of the album with his index finger. ‘This. This. This is the problem’.
As Albania remodels itself as a Mediterranean holiday playground, the connection between history and politics which so concerned Ypi’s grandfather, and apparently our companion, recedes. Unlike other Eastern European countries, Albania has very few reminders of the injustices under Stalinist rule and beyond. There are two major museums dedicated to the victims of communist rule in Tirana: the Bunker Museum and the Museum of Secret Surveillance, also known as the House of Leaves, which details the extraordinary degree of surveillance to which the regime’s secret police, the Sigurimi, subjected Albanians. A former prison has also been turned into a memorial in the town of Shkodër. In another small town, Përmet, we saw a marker for the victims of the 1997 civil unrest. Overall, though, on our travels these memorials were far outnumbered by the many larger-than-life statues of partisans rendered in the style of classic socialist realism.
Approaching us was a one-man protest against this forgetting. What motivated our new friend might have been grief over the death of his wife or the years lost in prison, expressed as a labour of sorrow rather than an outpouring of rage—as an opportunity to educate rather than to vent his anger. His fight to keep the memory of the past alive, one tourist at a time, was essentially quixotic. But it was also deeply moving, mainly because it contained a kernel of hope to effect change, however improbable. As Lea Ypi reminds us in an interview about her memoir, hope ‘is a moral duty—we have to act as though there is the chance of things going in a way that is favourable to what we want to achieve. If we were nihilistic, we couldn’t uphold that sense of duty’.
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Great piece