Letter from Tirana: as the threat of urban demolition looms, will creative communities survive?

Such precious rites began to fracture under the inescapable weight of Albania’s totalitarian communist regime. As borders were closed, many became informers for the Sigurimi, the state police, and the exchange of information suddenly became life-threatening. Later, civil conflict in 1996 and 1997 further eroded the idea of exchange and hospitality.

But this ancient rite of hosting can still be found in contemporary Tirana in initiatives that embrace the “unknown” in their spaces: cultural groups that have been displaced by the gentrification that is continuously changing the city landscape. As more and more historical buildings are paved over in the city centre in the name of “regeneration,” otherwise blossoming cultural and community spaces are being turned onto the street. Yet, these groups are resisting the city’s rapid gentrification by finding new homes in a time of impermanence. And while some businesses are opening their doors to new guests, others are daring to welcome the “unknown” by building new nomadic initiatives.

Tirana’s Backpackers Hostel is just one of the venues pioneering this new wave of initiatives. I remember going to the hostel a couple of years ago, strolling through the local labyrinth of rrugicas, the city’s ubiquitous pathways and mini-streets, into the sanctuary of the garden. My nose quickly travelled from the meaty smoke of the local zgaras – the abundant grill houses – to other lands: a mix of curry spices wafted from the recently-built outdoor communal kitchen. Locals and visitors were reading, playing music, drinking raki, or simply lazing about while waiting for dinner, prepared every night by a different volunteer. Now, in March 2021, the atmosphere is quiet. The hostel’s manager, Ilir Hysa, prepares coffee. Renovations are being made, a sort of collective spiritual preparation for when the pandemic has subsided and the villa can come back to life. In the meantime, several historical buildings are being torn down just around the corner, making space for the seemingly endless endeavor of real estate speculation. Trapped amid the cycle of construction and destruction, the outside world becomes too loud, and we find a small room inside the hostel to talk.

Hysa opened the business in 2005. “For me, it was a little bit unexpected,” he says. “I did not plan to start a hostel. I didn’t even know what a hostel was.” At the time, Hysa was in his 30s and managing a restaurant. One night, he and his friend Edvin Parruca met a backpacker from Denmark, who told them the city needed a hostel. Albanians were only granted visa-free travel within the Schengen territories in 2010, and five years prior, neither Hysa nor Parruca had experienced a hostel or the malleable community one can foster. But the encounter spurred them, together with their colleague Nevila Prifti, to start work on what was then considered an urban leftover: an abandoned villa built during the Italian occupation of the 1930s. “It was a beautiful big garden with trees and the villa had nice architecture with a big basement,” says Hysa. “Taking care of the house was what kept me passionate about doing this. The feeling of being connected with the place happens when I maintain it. By painting a door or fixing something, I feel a connection, which is very special for me”. It did not take long before their project gave life to much more than a business. Their care for the space, the time taken to tell and listen to stories, transformed the building from a common space into an idea of community. Local musicians would play with guests; together they would cook, take part in the never-ending process of fixing the villa, grow vegetables. But the team had to find a new home to take care of when the owners of the villa decided to lease the building to more a profitable business. Backpackers had to change locations, and since 2013, has made its home on Rruga e Bogdaneve street.

Other projects are simply abandoning the idea of a physical space altogether. After my conversation with Hysa, I go back towards the city center, across the convex Skanderbeg Square and alongside the sharp-edged colonnade of the National Library. I enter a light blue wooden door in the building opposite that opens onto a polished concrete staircase. This structure too was designed during the Italian occupation – at the time and for 30 years afterwards, it was the tallest building in the country. Even this building has been earmarked for demolition. Inside, the solid stairs lead to creakier, wooden counterparts that reveal the radical bookshop 28 November, named both after its address and Albania’s Independence Day. It is the last week of the shop’s “dematerializing sale” before they leave the space for good. After more than a year of not being able to gather people physically, 28 decided to simply do away with it all together, continuing in a more nomadic form. Sitting among the books as the sun shapes our shadows through the attic space, the group tells me they are simply no long interested in mirroring the Western or European image of a community that endures both in time and space. Instead, they hope to seed their dialogue — film screenings, bootleg bookmaking, collective readings, experimental breathing workshops — on the ground of impermanence.

I walk home a few books richer to my apartment, where the balcony overlooks a tireless crane as it builds the sixth floor of the building that was once the former Destil. With the dust still yet to fall, it is difficult to take a collective picture of a creative Tirana. But ultimately the precarious nature of Albania’s cultural initiative has made an atomised network of creative spaces in which community can thrive. Perhaps most importantly is that amid this precarity, cultural actors are still foregrounding discourse, in all its forms, wherever that can or will take place — all in an effort to carve out, over time, safe spaces for conversation when the noise of the city outside becomes too loud. The creative community in Tirana, no matter the wrecking balls, keeps its door cracked in case someone is looking for a shelter — even while playing hide and seek.