Dark tourism in Albania: ‘our suffering yesterday is your entertainment today’
- Former dictator Enver Hoxha’s nuclear shelter is among the landmarks that have been transformed into tourist attractions
- Two Bunk’Art museums have been accused on the Disneyfication of Albania’s post-war history
On a barren mountainside above the outskirts of Tirana, our footsteps echo ominously as we step through a series of airtight concrete and steel doorways, each many inches thick, and into a labyrinth of corridors that burrow deep into Mount Dajti.
Electric lights flicker, distant sirens moan, old desk telephones ring, and clipped, recorded voices drift up from the bowels of a once-secret five-storey subterranean complex created to save the skins of Albania’s ruling elite in the event of war, while everyone above is eviscerated in a mushroom cloud.
This vast, sinister compound 8km from the centre of the capital sucks visitors down into the bowels of the Earth and back in time – to an era when it was not fear of a pandemic that hovered uneasily in the national consciousness but an even more terrifying prospect: nuclear holocaust.
It is this harrowing history that Albania will be drawing on to entice tourists when they begin travelling again. The immense former nuclear bunkers in Tirana have been opened as visitor attractions, along with other macabre landmarks of the half-century of post-war tyranny and isolation that earned Albania the nickname “the North Korea of Europe”. Before the world locked down, I took a tour.
“Welcome to our horrible history,” our world-weary tour guide declares, with sardonic humour, as he drops us off at a complex that was once only whispered about by Tirana’s benighted residents, who lived in perpetual fear of arrest by the Sigurimi secret police. “Our suffering yesterday is your entertainment today.”
