Travel notes from a trip to Gjirokastra
By Jerina Zaloshnja
It was pure coincidence that I took a photograph of that tiny little window, while we were walking down “Fools Walkway,” and I felt my throat tighten with emotion. It resembled a black cavity in that wall built out of huge and smooth white stone; or like a human mouth with a bundle of black rags jammed down its throat. Spine-chilling! Instead of glass window panes, somebody, probably the owners of this abandoned domicile, had nailed boards onto the frame, so you couldn’t see anything inside, if there were anything left to see inside. As the occasional passer-by informed me, the house with the boarded up window had been abandoned for at least ten years now, and there was absolutely nothing inside. As if the boards were not enough, wires had been run underneath and over the iron bars covering the window on the outside, all very complicated. Who could ever attempt to have a look inside?
“This city is suffocating,” I said to myself and quickened my step. Gjirokastra, (300 kilometers south of Tirana), gave me the exact same first impression as when I had visited it fifteen years ago. From the balcony of my room at “Hotel Turizmi,” the only five star hotel in those years in Gjirokastra, the view of the city was so silent and void of movement; the streets were almost lifeless in this city of white stone. You could almost feel the pulse of the people as they went through the ritual of their evening stroll in the city’s only square. It resembled the seclusion of a bunker, a small, stifling bunker within the confines of Albania-a bigger bunker. I distinctly recall that for the whole month that I was there on a business trip back then I never saw a single woman sit down in a coffee shop for a coffee or stroll down the street in the evening. Men were proprietors of this city. It was also dominated by many houses that were monuments of culture, and who knows why, but at night time a strange type of bird warbled from rooftops, a bird I had never seen in other cities before. I remember one funny episode from those previous times. Sitting on the hotel’s veranda overlooking the city one evening, a couple from France who were having dinner suddenly started laughing whilst looking in the direction of the main square. “May I ask what you are laughing at,” I found the courage to ask as there were only the three of us sitting on the veranda. “Well,” replied the lady in broken English, “for a whole hour, only one vehicle has driven by, another car just went past, but, it was the same oneŢ It was probably one of the few vehicles in the city. It was the luxury vehicle of the First Secretary of the District, the most important person in the city, a gray “Fiat” of the seventies’.
The walkways between the houses still preserve that strange silence to this day, although the voices of the locals rebound like the sharp rapping of the wooden clogs over the cobblestone paths. The residents of the old city quarters still have the habit of squatting down against the outside walls of their houses and drinking coffee they pour out of coffee pots handed down over generations.
Locations have strange, mysterious names such as “Fools Walkway.” This is a narrow alleyway, down which the inebriated would lurch at night, dislodging stones as they stumbled, making a terrible din. There are other strange names in the other city quarters too. Manalat, Varosh, Dunavat. The oldest houses are between two to three centuries old, but still await reconstruction work due to the insufficient funds allocated in the state budget for this work and flaws in Albanian legislation on monuments of culture. Up above the city, the Castle walls house the most interesting museum containing all the kinds of weaponry that have ever existed in Albania, since the Stone Age. There are still levels far below the castle that have not yet been penetrated. This city has always been distinguished as the city of the affluent, of memoirs, of personal libraries, of individuals who bequeathed property to relatives in wills – a unique case in Albania. This city has given birth to individuals, who, in a manner of speaking, have shaped the history of Albania. This is the birthplace of a linguist of European caliber, Eqerem ȡbej, the writer Ismail Kadare, Dino Cici, a self taught inventor who in 1930 built an airplane without water and without gasoline, with wooden gears, as well as the individual who stifled this country for forty five years on end, dictator Enver Hoxha,
The movement of the “Stone City”
At one of the eateries at Viroi (one of Gjirokastra’s tourist attractions), at ten at night, the voices of women carry across the water. This is a major change; women appear to be enjoying themselves a lot more now. You can see them climbing into latest models of Mercedes Benz, going out for a drink. The traffic is endless; the luxury vehicles with their Greek number plates come and go, bringing back emigrants for holidays with their families. In the “New Town,” as the locals call the lower part of the city, built during these past fifteen years and which has no connection with the old, museum and traditional part of Gjirokastra- the eateries and coffee shops are packed. There is a businesslike air about people, they seem to have a goal and are certain they will get to where they are going. As regards what I said earlier, and due to the fact that there are dozens of money dealers on the streets, swamped with customers, very busy changing currencies, obviously there have been major changes in Gjirokastra. The air is far cleaner than in Tirana, the city is relatively litter free, you don’t see beggars digging into rubbish cans. People laugh. Apart from the money in their savings accounts, they also preserve a kind of identity. Yes, it is obvious that things have begun to move in Gjirokastra. It’s as if this younger part of the city is fighting to escape from the emptiness and the abandonment from which the castle and the entire surrounding museum zone suffer.
Stories of financing, foreign donors and hashish
“The City Hall belongs to everyone. It’s like a donation box where everyone should drop something,” says Mayor of Gjirokastra, Flamur Bime, for the Tirana Times. According to him, the good management of public finances and funding of projects by foreign donors have restored trust amongst the citizens. Bime is not a local, at least he is not one hundred percent from Gjirokastra, however he is wealthy. Before running for Mayor, he was the owner of a powerful construction company. This is one of the rare cases. In Albania, individuals who become Mayors or top officials in the State or in politics usually come from modest backgrounds. It appears that the fact that he has a considerable personal wealth already leaves no room for any incentive to misuse public funds. He certainly is very good at getting finances right. During the two and a half years of his mandate, Bime seems to have conducted a veritable fiscal revolution related to public funds. All indices that showed loss have been continually positive. All financial hemorrhage has stopped due to daily checks. 25 young men and women, all with foreign degrees, have been employed in the Municipality. Every evening financial accounts showing all activities of the Municipality are placed on his desk, so that financially everything is watertight. With the profits from these savings he has tar sealed 36 kilometers of new roads for the city and the locals call him the only Mayor who urbanized Gjirokastra. From 94 million new lek which was the revenue of the Municipality when Bime came into office in 2003, today, the Municipality realizes 150 million new lek. Foreign donors have been the second targets of the Mayor. Three years ago, “Pakart” was the only foundation operating in Gjirokastra, funding a few modest projects. Bime came up with the idea for the Foundation to join staffs with that of the Municipality to realize joint projects to restore the ancient city. The foundation realized 80 per cent of the projects, the Municipality 20 per cent. Following this incentive, the UNDP approached the Mayor with proposals for several other community projects. With fifty-fifty percent funding, the Municipality and the UNDP completed 6 projects, another four were conducted with the funding of the Austrian Government. A project with the Italian Government paid for the creation of the passport of Gjirokastra, the photographing and digitalization of the entire museum zone of the city. The tight control over finances and the work with the donors are, at the end of the day, fifty percent of the reason why things have begun to change for the better in this city of stone. “Hashish and the Kakavija Border Customs Point are the other half of the reason,” says Odisea, a reporter who works for Deutsche Welle told the Tirana Times, and a young police officer of the city’s Force who expects to be moved to a new post any day now. The police officer will be shifted to another district, to the Border Customs Point known as “Tri Ura,” (Three Bridges), on the south eastern border with Greece. The young man does not appear to be happy with this. From what he was saying, this border post is located at a spot that is quite open and divest of trees and foliage. So it is easier to detect illegal border crossings by smugglers with their trucks. So financially the policeman thinks he would be better off where he is. Unfortunately others have their eye on his job in Gjirokastra, individuals who have their connections with the current government and do not want to waste time in becoming wealthy. The leading businesses of the city keep business thriving through trade with Kakavija. This is obvious when you look at the people in the streets, the bulk of whom unfortunately speak Greek. Linda, a reporter for one of the Albanian daily newspapers insists on visiting Lazarat, a village where instead of wheat crops the locals grow hashish, so that she too could take a photograph of these crops. It is now the peak of the harvesting and the processing of these crops. Linda seeks the assistance of the Police to get her scoop of the day. However, none of the police officers are game enough to drive a police van up into the area on such a perilous trip. “One of the local Police Chiefs even offered me a handful of money not to publish anything on the farmers who grow these crops. A few days after the publication of her photos of the fields of hashish crops, the local police force launched a major action, slashing and destroying entire crops, but they failed to capture a single crop grower, they had all disappeared without trace. “This is one of those strange stories that repeats itself at about this time every year, and everyone knows what’s going on,” said Linda. The crops that produce drugs, the Border Customs Point of Kakavija have become secure sources of livelihood in Gjirokastra.
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“My family settled in this area about three hundred years ago. My grandfather sold limestone and building materials. My family laid the cobblestone roads of the Big Bazaar. We used to have a three storied house, with two wells and subterranean storage rooms. But still I am not originally from Gjirokastra,” says Odise regretfully. Many people from other regions settled here. People like Odise believe that this is not good for Gjirokastra. They seem to be waiting patiently for some sort of “ending” to this episode, something like a duel to see which part transforms the other; the locals absorb the outside settlers or the other way round. Perhaps they hope that the words of the local folk song will come true, which says that this city will even transform the outside settlers into original Gjirokastri-ts. There are also others who believe strongly that the outsiders will change something in the rigidity of this stone city. They will be the motor that will make it move. They will revive life in the old, museum section of the city and will develop cultural tourism. The 200-300 year old museum houses will be transformed into museums, always attractive to tourists. Perhaps the outsiders and the new times will even manage to prise open that tiny window, all boarded up and closed on “Fool’s Walkway.” It is beyond doubt that in the state it is in, no-one would be interested.
The Castle of Gjirokastra
It is 800 meters long and 200 meters wide. It was first mentioned as an inhabited location in the fourth Century BC. The encompassing wall inside the castle dates back to the 6th Century, the year 568. The initial inhabitants of the Castle were the members of the Tribe called the Argjirins. (In the 12th Century Gjirokastra is mentioned as a township too, with about 200 families). With the Turkish occupation, offices were built within the castle walls, water reservoirs, and prison cells. To this day, there are levels beneath the castle that have never been explored. It is thought that they were used as prison cells because it is pitch black and the cobbling on the stone floors is pointed, possibly a means of torture. In 1812, Ali Pasha of Tepelena, the new conqueror of the castle, constructed the Great Porte and the south western section of the castle. (The inhabitants left when the Pasha of Janina arrived). On the same spot where today the stage for the national folklore festivals stands, the Pasha built a viaduct raised on stone arches. It was 12 kilometres long and it brought supplies of fresh drinking water into the castle from Mt. Sopoti. The last arches of the viaduct were destroyed by King Zog the First in 1929, who also possessed the Castle for a few years. With the stones of the arches of the viaduct, the King built a prison which was used as such up until 1968.
