On the Shores of the Mediterranean (16 page)

Back at the hotel we were given a whole series of rockets by the interpreter, by the driver and by the Tour Leader, for going off without permission. We had also been reported by the unidentifiable but omnipresent Sigurimi for taking photographs of people.

‘You were taking pictures of peoples in shops without permission,’ the interpreter said. ‘It is forbidden.’

‘But look,’ I said, ‘the tour brochure says you can take pictures of people if you first ask their permission. We did ask, and they said, yes, we could.’

‘If they did give permission, they are wrong,’ he said. ‘You can ask permission to take photographs of Albanian peoples but Albanian peoples cannot give it.’

After our ticking-off for going round the corner, we were taken up to see the Fortress of Rozafat on the rock above the town, built by the Venetians in 1396 and heroically defended by them against the Turks under Suleiman Pasha in 1473, who lost 14,000 men attempting to take it, only to lose it to Mehmet Pasha in 1479, who is said to have lost 30,000 before the garrison surrendered.

It was here in the fortress that Edward Lear, while at Shkodër on his sketching trip through Albania in October 1848, was entertained by the governor of the fortress, a Turkish Pasha of Bosnian extraction, who treated him to a dinner of fifty courses. ‘Nothing,’ that most entertaining of travel writers wrote

was so surprising as the strange jumble of irrelevant food offered: lamb, honey, fish, fruit; baked, boiled, stewed, fried; vegetable, animal; fresh, salt, pickled; solid; oil, pepper; fluid; sweet, sour; hot, cold … the richest pastry came immediately after dressed fish and was succeeded by beef, honey, and cakes; pears and peaches; crabs, ham, boiled mutton, chocolate cakes, garlic, and fowl; cheese, rice, soup, strawberries, salmon-trout, and cauliflowers – it was a very chaos of a dinner!

From the rock on which it stood, a lot of the vast panorama was much as it had been when Lear was sketching it. On the shores of the lake shepherds were tending their flocks in the watermeadows. Below the rock the Bojana River flowed south out of the lake and then westwards by a navigable channel into the Adriatic, forming for part of its course the frontier with Yugoslavia. Down at the foot of it there was a mosque that Lear had sketched, now vandalized and with its minaret destroyed, and in the rock itself there were casemates housing the guns covering the approaches to the bridge which carries the only road to central and southern
Albania. Soon they would also cover a railway bridge which would carry the new line that was being pushed up from the Durrës to Shkodër, which one day perhaps would extend as far as Han-i-Hotit on the frontier, and eventually be linked with a Yugoslav line from Titograd and the rest of the European railway system.

Back in the city what appeared to be the entire population, now all cleaned up after their eight hours’ labour, were engaged in the
passeggiata
, strolling up and down under the trees in the gloaming engaged in animated conversation, a custom the Albanians probably learned from the Italians between the wars when the two countries were on friendly terms, for it is certainly not something they would ever have learned as subjects of the Turks.

Long after we had finished eating the worst sort of dinner – rissoles like big toes that had gone to sleep, followed by sickly cream cake – some sad musicians began to play; sad because they had been waiting ages to play for us and no one told us they were waiting to do so. To their accompaniment the driver and the interpreter, displaying the softer sides of their natures, danced an Albanian equivalent to the Yugoslav
kolo
, with handkerchiefs.

Later, two members of our group, a pair of women’s liberators, began to attack them about the place of Albanian women in society and in bed, which, after some ten hours in the country, was not beginning to sound or look all that rosy to them, and the evening ended on an acrimonious note. In fact a lot of evenings ended on an acrimonious note on account of there being nothing to do, a lot to drink, and the driver and interpreter hanging about, outstaying their welcome. Television programmes were primitive. Endless, lingering shots of industrial plants and interminable political harangues and discourses which could scarcely have appealed to an Albanian worker after an eight-hour working day.
Newspapers were equally indigestible and we never saw anyone carrying, let alone reading one. Football results were written up on boards displayed in the street. By 8 p.m. on weekdays most people had gone home to bed. By ten the streets were as quiet as the grave. ‘God, what an evening!’ we said to each other at the end of this, and each succeeding one.

Dawn came about 6 a.m., by which time the municipal water-carts were well advanced with their work of dampening the streets. Old ladies, who in Britain would have long since been consigned to a home, were already on the go, wielding their besoms as they do in communist countries everywhere, overlooked by a very unavuncular bust of Stalin. (Albania is the only place in the communist world where you can still contemplate a bust of Stalin.) The square below our window resembled an enormous enlargement of a Lowry painting, filled with the matchstick figures of what might be described without offence as the dirty workers, en route either to fight their way on to the buses or else board lorries which groaned away with them into the industrial areas, or even further into the unimaginable interior. The next wave, the school-children, some of them wearing red, Young Pioneer scarves, took off at 6.45 a.m., to be followed, at 7.15 a.m., by bureaucrats strolling to their offices with briefcases. Last of all came shop assistants.

After breakfast, we were escorted to the Muzeu Ateist, the Museum of Atheism, Albania being officially Godless since 1967, a promised treat which our hosts perversely showed signs of withholding from us when they saw how enthusiastic we were.

It was housed in a pleasant nineteenth-century villa that must have belonged to what Russian communists call ‘the former people’, across the square from the hotel. Like its much larger counterpart, the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism
in the former Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan in Leningrad, where they used to have a very funny nineteenth-century engraving of a gloomy-looking Roman Catholic monk carting a peasant girl into his monastery camouflaged as a sheaf of wheat in a sack, some of its exhibits were slightly lubricious. The Roman Catholic Cathedral at Shkodër was now a sports hall.

Downstairs in the main hall, where a placard announced predictably that ‘Religion is the Opium of the People’ and photography was permitted,
Then
and
Now
maps showed the past and present state of religion in Albania. The
Then
maps showed Albania before religion was officially abolished, full of mosques and churches, when 73 per cent of the population were Muslims, 17 per cent were Orthodox and 10 per cent were Roman Catholic (in 1938 there were said to have been 144 religious institutions, 48 schools and one hospital). The
Now
maps showed Albania in 1973 with 307 schools, 371 hospitals and clinics and no mosques or churches.

The actual process of destruction began after 1967, during Albania’s equivalent to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when the students were given the task of blowing up or otherwise obliterating religious buildings, destroying graveyards and publicly ridiculing anyone who still continued his religious observances. Only a few mosques were spared, some, presumably, because of their architectural significance. Those priests and members of the laity who, in spite of everything, persisted in practising their religion were either done away with or sent to forced labour camps. The only sect to have survived, semi-clandestinely, are the Bektashi, an order of Shia dervishes who unite Islamic, pre-Islamic, Christian and pagan beliefs. That they have succeeded in doing so is itself a near miracle.

Later on the tour, emerging from a gorge in the Shkumbin River, east of Elbasan, we passed four of these forced labour camps
in quick succession, which we had been told to look out for by someone who knew their whereabouts. Behind them in the mountainside were large stone quarries, and one of the abiding memories of the trip to Albania was the sight of a shaven-headed party of unfortunates being marched back to their huts in the last of the light by their armed guards.
²

Upstairs in the Museum, where for some obscure reason photography was forbidden, the visit became endless. The Director, the first director of an atheists’ museum most of us had ever seen, laboriously described every item in detail in Albanian which the interpreter, who must have committed some serious crime to have been given his job in the first place, equally laboriously turned into English. We saw confessional boxes, photostats of letters from an Albanian bishop to his superiors in Rome reporting on priests who had been engaging in unseemly practices, or had contracted clap, engravings of Spanish Inquisitors sending heretics up in smoke, photographs of mad-looking mullahs, priests welcoming Fascist invaders or engaging in what the caption described as ‘rock and roli’ with female parishioners, and a hollowed-out Bible with a pistol secreted in it.

‘But it isn’t a real gun,’ someone said. ‘It’s plastic.’

‘The Director says he hasn’t noticed that the gun was plastic,’ the interpreter said, ‘but he says that at one time it must have been a real one.’

As we were leaving we were invited to sign the visitors’ book. One entry was by a member of the Franco-Albanian Friendship Society, who wrote in it,
‘La groupe a été ravie de la visite dans ce
musée de l’Athéisme’
. One could only suppose that in order to be ravished they must have been tight. And one of our group wrote that she had been thrilled by it too.

On the way south after leaving Shkodër we met a number of boy and girl student volunteers from Tirana University who were working on the construction of a railway line, rather listlessly shovelling ballast on the permanent way in the midst of a treeless plain, while flat cars loaded with rails made by Krupp in West Germany, hauled by Czechoslovak diesel engines, were run up and down the line in an attempt to flatten it, apparently without much success.

‘It’ll never be right, whatever they do to it,’ an English engineer who was a member of our group said gloomily. ‘It’s just hopelessly badly built.’

These students, who were studying French and were in their last year at the university, were asked by a French Canadian, a member of the group masquerading as a university professor but actually a journalist, which French authors they had read or heard about. He was told Zola, Stendhal, Voltaire, Rousseau and some other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. None of them could name a single French writer of the twentieth century, just as a similar group, further up the line, who were studying English, could not name a single twentieth-century author of any work in the English language, including Americans.

During this time, twice and thrice daily admonitions of the more inquisitively minded members of the group, of whom we were numbered, became part of our lives, either for taking photographs of what were mostly completely innocuous subjects, or else for wandering off to look at whatever was outside the hotel instead of sitting meekly in the lounge waiting for the coach to leave.

Eventually, things came to an ugly head at Apollonia, a ruined Graeco-Roman city on a hill above the sea near Fieri, which
flourished between the third and first centuries BC, where the remains of a temple of Artemis and of an exquisite small theatre were to be seen. There was also what had been an Orthodox monastery, built, according to Lear, who spent a very uncomfortable night in it in October 1848, by the Albanian despot, Ali Pasha of Tepelenë, in order to encourage the local Greek Christians, who were scared stiff of him, to remain where they were and cultivate the surrounding country which they would otherwise have fled, leaving it to what the Pasha would have described as his more lackadaisical, shiftless co-religionists. It was a charming place, very little changed since Lear wrote his description of it.

Behind the monastery and the church, which had a number of very beautiful but very badly neglected ikons propped up in the narthex, exposed to every extreme of heat and damp, was something now extremely rare in Albania, a partly undesecrated Christian cemetery. Up to that time any cemeteries we had seen fleetingly from the bus were new ones with standard, undenominational tombstones. In this one there still remained the tombs of eight members of the same family, the last of whom had been buried as late as 1980. What influence, I wondered, could this family have had, sufficient to enable their tombs to remain undesecrated and to allow for the burial of one of its members to take place so recently?

The view from the cemetery, which stood on a bare, windswept hillock, was extensive, across fields to the sea and further inland to some low hills with perhaps the most heavily fortified defence system we had seen anywhere in Albania, the
pièce de résistance
of which was a battery of twenty-four heavy guns.

When we returned from visiting the cemetery the driver took us to one side and revealed himself for what he was. We had long since realized that he was important, far senior to the interpreter, but not quite how important. It was impressive to think that the
Albanian administration could afford to squander the ability of such a man in such a mundane job. Perhaps, like the Chinese, they often have to squander able people in mundane jobs because there is simply no one else with sufficient ability to perform them. Perhaps it was punishment for wrong-doing or some kind of deviation, of a sort that I had envisaged as being the fate of the interpreter, doomed to translate the observations made by the Director of the Museum of Atheism, possibly for the rest of his life.