Albania opens up Cold War secret bunker, turns it into tourist attraction

A small underground town under Tirana’s eastern hills, the massive bunker was build to accommodate the communist leadership, but now will serve as an art space and a museum of collective memories.
TIRANA, Nov. 22 – Authorities have opened up to the public a gigantic secret Cold War area bunker that the former communist regime had built underground decades ago to survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union or the United States. It would house the country’s top political and military leadership if the country came under attack.
Prime Minister Edi Rama led visitors, including Western ambassadors, on a tour of the never used 106-room, five-story bunker, before opening it up to the public.
“We have opened today a treasure of the collective memory that presents thousands of pieces of the sad events and life” under communism,” Rama said, speaking at the bunker’s 200-seat hall, which was to serve as the meeting place for the rubber-stamp communist parliament.
The bunker was built by the late communist dictator Enver Hoxha near Tirana in the 1970s to prepare for a possible nuclear attack from “American imperialism or Soviet social-imperialism,” as the two superpowers were referred to by the communist regime.
Hoxha, whose regime built up to 700,000 bunkers of different sizes and tunnels all around the country, died in 1985. The communist regime was toppled in 1990.
Rama said the bunker was opened ahead of Albania’s 70th World War II Liberation Day, celebrated on Nov. 29. The government plans to use it as a tourist attraction and an exhibition space for artists.
Before entering the tiny door into the massive bunker, visitors could view Soviet- made Zim-12 luxurious car of the time given to Hoxha as a gift from then- Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
For the moment the one-meter thick cement-wall big bunker going 100-meter deep offers a museum with pictures and items from World War II, the communist regime until 1990 and digital projections and works of art commemorating the country’s 70th anniversary of liberation from the Nazis.
One of its floors, which to enter everyone had to bow when crossing heavy cement and metal doors, has turned into a museum with pictures, clothes and weapons from World War II.
Albania was first occupied by fascist Italy in 1939 and then by Nazi Germany in 1943. Hoxha’s Communist Party joined the anti-fascist and anti-Nazi coalition but liberated the country without the support of the Soviet Union’s Red Army.
In the small, cold and smelly rooms one can see military equipment used by the communist regime, mainly received from the Soviet Union and China.
The bunker was built in 1970-74 but completed in 1978, when Tirana broke ties with China, remaining, as it said, the only communist country in the world. Before in 1962 Albania broke ties with Soviet Union and in 1968 went out of the Warsaw Treaty too.
A students’ protest in December 1990 in this small Adriatic republic toppled the communist regime and launched political pluralism. Now, a NATO member since 2009, it has also applied for membership into the European Union.
Entrance to the bunker will be free to local and foreign visitors “to see these state secrets that show what kind of hell took the country’s (communist) ideology in” for 46 years until 1990.
Hoxha’s regime built up to 700,000 bunkers of different size and tunnels all around the country, many equal to a small one-room apartment cost, though Tirana was the poorest in the continent.
It was not possible to learn the cost of the bunker at the time but it had remained unused, but well-preserved by the army.
“Why should such a mystery be preserved these more than 20 years?” asked Rama, adding that soon some other “halls preserved as state secrets” will be open so that “to release the collective memory from the communist nightmares.”
Rama also hinted that Albania should no longer keep closed the former communist secret intelligence police files, something that sparked a debate the next days.
Post-communist Albania has made many attempts to open those files. But they have always failed. Sometimes they have been selectively used to stop any person running for a political post. Such efforts have only sparked the anger and the debate of the common people who are entitled to know the work of the former regime, as they have been promised.
Many Albanians have called that all the former informers of the secret police should become known. There have been voices of the names of top politicians and officials affiliating them with the previous regime police.
There have been several other activities to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Albania. The Defense Ministry on Tuesday distributed 1,000 medals of recognition and 20 medals of honor for participants during the World War II.
Many celebrations for Liberation Day are expected of the weekend to mark its 70th anniversary.