By Artan Lame
Tirana in the 20’s-30’s. Prior to the 19th Century public games were not a usual occurrence and even less so in Moslem countries. In our country, groups of wandering gypsies would stage street side shows, sometimes with a performing bear or other such acts, and that was about the extent of any public games. It was only in the first years of the 20th Century that reserved attempts were made to organize public games, of course, children’s games, at public gatherings on the occasion of religious celebrations or fairs. In particular this was influenced by contacts with the West, and the occasional return of emigrants to the country, who also brought with them the fashions of the countries they had lived in. In the first photograph, in one of the fields on the outskirts of Tirana, a merry-go-round of wooden planks and boards has been has been improvised. Looking at it more closely, it appears to be the most dangerous and shakiest contraption ever made, but this doesn’t stop the children from clambering into its baskets, or to circle around it impatiently awaiting their turn to be whirled around. Of course the merry-go-round was pushed around manually by two or three persons pushing the baskets. It is truly a miracle that the carpenters managed to make something that remained standing and moreover, that went around, such an unsafe looking contraption made of all of those wooden trunks and planks that appear to have only one thing in common; their total unevenness, to the extent where the whole thing resembles a structure out of the Stone Age, when the saw and evenly cut planks of timber had not been invented. A gypsy, beating out the rhythm on his drum completes this picture.
The second photograph, judging from the surroundings and the dress of the people, depicts a scene probably from the years 1936-1938. Now, we have a far more modern version of a merry-go-round; there are no longer four but six baskets and the planks of wood have been more evenly cut, not by axe, as in the above version, but sawn. If you look closer, beyond the merry-go-round, you can make out the building of Parliament (today the Puppet Theatre), and the back of Government House (today the Ministry of Energy). This means that the merry-go-rounds were probably situated on the spot where the seat of the Socialist Party is today. Since the time of Turkey, this field has been used, as a part of the area known as the Field of the Shallvareve, for the military training of the Turkish garrison of the city, but up until the thirties’ it remained open space and was only used very rarely on occasions like the above. During the years of the War, the Italians built a temporary cinema there for their own troops, which as dismantled in the fifties’. The field went back to being nothing but a park again, but finally in the Seventies, construction work began on it and the building of the Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania for Tirana went up, which after 1991 became the seat of that Party.
