Day 141: Shirokë and Rozafa Castle

Aug 22 - Hunt down the tourist office, which turns out to be a decent source for information. Get a taxi west for the town of Shirokë, on Lake Shkodra. I don’t really have a feel for what might be here, and as it turns out, there isn’t a lot to do. The lake is vast, the largest in Europe, with some marshy parts just north and east of here. And while the lake itself is filled with bird and fish life, the shores near urban development are a bit polluted with plastic trash. In other words, there is no hope that Odette can go swimming in it as she hoped.

Getting a taxi back turns out to be a real quandary. None just pass through here, as we find out after sitting around for a long time by the road. End up calling the same taxi that brought us out (his phone number was on the receipt) and returned east, via Rozafa Castle.

Rozafa Castle sits on a prominent hill just south of the lake. Hydrologically, it is an unusual spot: a river coming out of the mountains to the east (the Drin), passes just to the south, while another river (the Buna), just happens to drain out of the lake here as well. The confluence of the two rivers occurs at the base of the hill, and the combined flow goes out to the Adriatic Sea.

Excavations on the hill reveal that fortifications date back to at least the 4th Century, and Roman sources record structures existed here from pre-Roman (Illyrian) times. However, all the currently invisible walls and structures are a product of Venetian fortifications, updated by the Ottomans.

Back to downtown in the late afternoon. Go down one of the main avenues to a museum called ‘Site of Witness and Memory’. I know this was going to be a rough one but we all troop in there anyway.

The building that hosts the museum used to be the location of the Ministry of the Interior, after the Communist takeover in 1946. This is about the same time as the ideas of Communism were percolating through all of the Balkans. However, unlike the nations of the former Yugoslavia, Albania had no Josip Tito to ride that thin line between East and West. Albania succumbed to a Stalin-inspired military state, under the rule of Enver Hoxha. He went for the lowest common denominator in a Communist state, using all the state levers to maximize obedience through repression, torture, and assassination. Hence this building, being the primary facility to control the people in the area of Shkoder, was essentially a prison. The rear of the building has a number of jail cells and torture chambers where ‘confessions’ were extracted and prisoners languished for years on end.

This dark era of Albania’s history went from 1946 to 1991, the year that massive popular protests collapsed the Communist regime (by this point under Hoxha’s successor). The tale told of the Communist years and subsequent uprising is quite vivid, in detailed survivor accounts and old film footage.

One of the primary projects of Hoxha was the purging of all religious life. During his time, thousands of churches and mosques were destroyed, along with their decorations and relics, and religious leaders were put on sham trials. Albania held the dubious distinction of being the world’s first declared atheist state (in 1976). I say ‘dubious’ because, like other places in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the leaders of the country (and ones already deceased) became de-facto religious icons. Albania even went so far as to ban all religious holidays, replacing them with dates important to the Communist state, such as May Day.