“The Ministry of Culture is cooperating with the Orthodox church to harmonize interventions in these objects in order to ensure their protection,” said Culture Minister Aldo Bumci.
TIRANA, Feb. 28 – Albania’s fifty-one most important churches have been included in a camera surveillance project after an ancient fresco was vandalized and robbed in the first days of 2013.
The project was unveiled by Culture Minister Aldo Bumci during a hearing with the education and media parliamentary committee. “The Ministry of Culture is cooperating with the Orthodox church to harmonize interventions in these objects in order to ensure their protection,” said Bumci.
Speaking of the damaged fresco in the St. Premte Church in Elbasan, central Albania, minister Bumci, said 40 percent of the fresco was being restored by specialists of the Monuments of Culture.
Most of the damaged and stolen frescoes at the small village church in Elbasan district were the work of Onufri, a painter of the 1500s considered to be Albania’s Michelangelo for his work on Orthodox churches in central and southern Albania.
The thieves used an ax-like tool to go after the heads of the saints in the frescoes, leaving behind the bare walls. Many of these parts were taken נlikely for illegal sale נand some were left destroyed because they had crumbled on the floor.
The Institute of Monuments of Culture says it has initiated a project to install 35 surveillance cameras in remote churches in Korca, Lushnja, Saranda, Elbasan which are home to paintings by renowned medieval painters Onufri, Kostandin Shpataraku etc.
Apollon Bace, the head of the Institute of Monuments of Culture, says the surveillance system project costs USD 100,000 and that efforts with donors and government are being made to implement it as soon as possible.
Shkodra museum
Minister Bumci said the Genocide Museum in the northern city of Shkodra was coming to end and that efforts were being made to turn the former notorious prison of political prisoners into a museum in cooperation with Cultural Heritage without Borders, CHwB, a Swedish NGO.
The museum of communism crimes built in the facilities of a former prison was suppossed to open in late 2012 when Albania celebrated its 100th anniversary of independence. The museum is being built under a 57 million lek (Euro 406,000) fund by the Shkodra Municipality and Culture Ministry, preserving all traces of the former prison including cells and proof of inmates imprisoned for their political views against the regime.
While the reconstruction of the building has already finished, the exhibition of items and personal belongings by inmates will complete the museum.
The northern town of Shkodra known for its anti-communism had 13 prisons with around 3,000 politically imprisoned people during the country’s 35-year communist regime. Hundreds of them were executed or died in prisons.
The Shkodra museum of Communist Crimes will be the second of this kind after the opening of the pavillion of Communist Terror at the National Museum of History in early 2012.
The museum has photographs of mass graves where many of the executed were buried, as well as handcuffs, chains and victim’s clothes and personal belongings.
Spa硰rison
Culture Minister Aldo Bumci pledged a similar museum will also open in the Spac political prison. The Spa硰rison was a political prison in communist Albania at the village of Spa箠The former prison is listed as a second-category national monument. There were plans to turn the rapidly-deteriorating site into a museum, but as of February 2013, no progress had been made at the location. In 1973, a number of prisoners at the Spa硣oncentration camp staged a rebellion where the non-communist flag was raised;
