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THE GLOBE LESS TRAVELED -- A closed-off city of secrets |
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Written by asap
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Friday, 07 July 2006 |
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GJIROKASTRA, Albania — Everywhere I went on the steep, hushed streets of this ancient fortress town, somebody was clandestinely watching me. Or so it seemed.
The fortress-houses that have made this southern Albanian town a UNESCO World Heritage site impart a sinister air. There are now windows on the ground floor and the upper stories have overhangs and recessed terraces from which to monitor the street. As I walked the streets, I heard soft voices from the terraces and from behind the high walls surrounding the gardens, but never saw who they belonged to.
The vast citadel of warlord Ali Pasha glowered from the town’s summit and it was easy to imagine one of his fighters peering through a spyglass at someone laboring slowly up the narrow streets under the fierce sun.
This is a place built to give you the creeps. Nobody’s really watching, I kept telling myself. That was a convincing theory until I stopped to catch my breath at a street corner.
“Where have you been?” asked a small, 40ish woman who suddenly appeared a foot in front of my face. “I didn’t see you yesterday. Why didn’t I see you?”
I’d never seen her before. She stared intently at me as I tried to formulate a reply, then darted through a gate into a garden.
TYRANNY TO ANARCHY TO...TOURISM?
Gjirokastra was a town where I never quite knew what was going on. I wasn’t the only one to have felt that way.
“It was a strange city, and seemed to have been cast up in the valley one winter’s night like some prehistoric creature that was now clawing its way up the mountainside,” Albania’s most lauded author, Ismail Kadare, begins the novel “Chronicle in Stone” about his hometown.
It’s an extraordinary book — sort of a magical-realist allegory of Albania’s World War II sufferings and its imminent plunge into postwar madness — and when I read it 20 years ago I longed to see Gjirokastra. But that was when Albania was closed off to the West by a regime so xenophobic that it built more than 700,000 bunkers and ordered vineyards to top the posts holding grapevines with iron spikes to impale paratroopers.
Once that regime fell, Albania became infamous for banditry. In 1997, it exploded into anarchy when pyramid schemes in which much of the country’s people had sunk their money collapsed. Every military arsenal in the country was looted; AK-47s went for as little as $20 and Gjirokastra stood out amid the chaos when brigands used a commandeered tank to break into a local bank.
At last, Albania has calmed enough for visits to Europe’s least-known country, with its dramatic vistas of harsh mountains, rivers of jade and turquoise and a culture devoted to both hospitality and revenge. The Kanun of Leke Dukagjin, a sort of medieval Emily Post etiquette guide that is a core of Albanian culture, gives detailed instructions on when you’re obliged to feed someone and when you’re obliged to kill him.
MOUNTAIN WALLS AND SHAG RUGS
Gjirokastra’s houses are built for both extremes. Though austere and ready for battle outside, they are exceptionally welcoming inside. The rooms are cool and airy, adorned with intricate carpets and lovingly worked wood carvings on the ceilings. Couches along the walls are covered in tapestries or in the red-dyed sheepskins that are a mark of having made it (even if they look like a shag rug from an Austin Powers movie).
One of the best houses is the town ethnographic museum, which is also the boyhood home of Enver Hoxha, the dictator who led Albania into a half-century of paranoid isolation. The docent who showed me around seemed uneasy about that. “He was a historical figure,” she said when I asked how she felt about him. That was the end of that conversation.
For a fuller experience, visit the guesthouse run by Dragua Kalemi, who has restored the house to near-museum quality while modernizing it with solar panels to compensate for Gjirokastra’s unreliable electricity. Its balcony is arguably worth the $30 nightly charge, with a thrilling view across the town and the bunker-studded Drina River valley to a mile-high mountain wall with deep green pines and amethyst shadows tapestried on the light gray stone.
Tearing myself away from that view was hard, but I wanted to see the citadel. This vast and bleak pile sits atop a summit so sheer that an adept Frisbee player could toss his hat onto the minaret of the town mosque below.
SHRIEKING RAVENS AND MINOR CHORDS
As I entered a long gloomy gallery in the ramparts, a raven shrieked in warning and flew toward me. The gallery was lined with aged artillery pieces, and the barrels all seemed to point at my head. It seemed smart to hurry toward the sunlight at the corridor:s far end.
Outside it was brighter but no less creepy. A 1950s U.S. Air Force Lockheed jet fighter sat, its insignia scoured into ghostliness by the weather and various of its parts fallen onto the grass. Some twisted, rusted fencing surrounded it, but no explanation of its presence was given. I read later that Albania claimed it was a spy plane shot down in 1957 — even though Albania apparently had no anti-aircraft weapons at the time.
The mystery was enhanced by music coming from somewhere in the town — a violin and a clarinet weaving long, sinuous melodies in a strange minor mode that encompassed both joy and longing. I sat on the ramparts to drink it in, looking down on the backs of birds circling in the thermals.
A man who had been doing some desultory work on a stone wall came over. Haxhi, he said I could call him, perhaps worried that his real name would get him in trouble for slacking off work.
“This is not good music,” he said. “Those birds are bad, very bad.”
I asked for elaboration, but communication was spotty — not surprisingly, given that he said he’d learned English in Belgium, where it is none of the official languages. After five minutes or so, the music shifted into a rousing song.
“Yes!” Haxhi exclaimed. “This is a real Albanian song. It’s about Napoleon Bonaparte.”
Napoleon, history says, never made it to Albania. I was perplexed, but language interfered again. We sat in companionable silence for a while. Then Haxhi was seized with a thought.
“This music is polyphonic,” he said. I was less impressed with the information than with the idea that this, of all words, had stuck in his English-via-Belgium vocabulary. And I was even more impressed with the happy realization that although Albania is now accessible physically, it’s still obscure at its heart.
ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT YOU’RE GOING
Here’s more from The Kanun of Lek Dukjagin, that medieval Albanian etiquette guide. Passed down orally for centuries, it was compiled in printed form about 100 years ago by a scholarly priest. (Conducting a feud with a clan that dishonored you is called being “in blood.”)
- “The house of the Albanian belongs to God and the guest.”
- “If a guest enters your house, even though he may be in blood with you, you must say to him ‘Welcome’.”
- “If you do not avenge the murder of your guest, even if the murderer is a fellow-villager, you may not participate in meetings of honorable men, because you remain dishonored for the rest of your life.”
- “If the murder has been committed in his own village, the murderer, together with the males of his house -- even inflants in the cradle -- must leave the village and go stay with friends to avoid the danger of being killed.”
- “If the guest has hung his rifle on a hook and the hook breaks, causing the rifle to fall on the ground where it discharges and kills someone, the owner of the hook (the master of the house) incurs the blood-feud.”
———
Jim Heintz is the Moscow news editor for The Associated Press.
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