Albania shows what happens to a free market when there is no legal, political, or traditional framework to define freedoms or protect marketplaces. Of course there’s lots of violence—as you’d expect in a situation where the shopkeepers and the shoplifters have the same status under law. And, of course, there’s lots of poverty. Theft is the opposite of creating wealth. Instead of moving assets from lower-valued to higher-valued uses, theft moves assets from higher-valued uses to a fence who pays ten cents on the dollar for them. But capitalism conducted in a condition of anarchy also produces some less-predictable phenomena. Albania has the distinction of being the only country ever destroyed by a chain letter—a nation devastated by a Ponzi racket, a land ruined by the pyramid scheme.
A pyramid is any financial deal in which investors make their money not from investing but from money put into the deal by other investors, and those investors make money from the investors after that, and so on. It’s the old “send five dollars to the name at the top of the list, put your own name at the bottom of the list, and mail copies to future ex-friends.” If I want to make fifty dollars from my five dollars, ten new dupes must be recruited. If each of them hopes to make fifty dollars, a hundred suckers will be needed, then a thousand, and hence the “pyramid” name. If a pyramid scheme grows in a simple exponential manner—101, 102, 103, etc.—it takes only ten layers of that pyramid to include nearly twice the population of the earth. And 9,999,999,999 of these people are going to get screwed because the guy who started the pyramid has run away with all the five-dollar bills.
When communist rule ended in Albania, in 1992, the nation was broke and was kept from starving only by foreign aid and remittances from Albanians in Italy, the U.S., and elsewhere. But the people of Albania still managed to scratch together some cash. Like American baby boomers, they were worried about the future. So, like baby boomers, they invested. The Albanians invested in pyramid schemes. The pyramids grew. People were getting rich, at least on paper. And then, in 1997, the pyramids collapsed.
Albanian reaction to the financial disaster was philosophical—if your philosophy is nihilism. Violent protests occurred all over the country. The Albanian government banned public meetings. The protests became more violent. The government reacted to this by authorizing the military to shoot at crowds. The military responded to that by deserting in droves. Soldiers had money in the pyramid schemes too, and were just as mad as anyone else. The violent protests turned into armed rebellions. The government lost control of every military base in the country. By spring the Albanian army was reduced to perhaps one intact unit, numbering a hundred soldiers. The entire defense arsenal was looted.
There’d been plenty to loot. Albania’s Communists had required every man, woman, boy, and girl to undergo military training. Estimates of the number of weapons loose in the country ranged as high as 1.5 million. And the Albanian defense ministry admitted that a whopping 10.5 billion rounds of ammunition had been stolen—more than three thousand bullets for every person in the nation. Heavy weapons were also pilfered—artillery, missile launchers, and high explosives. Some of these were taken by local Committees for Public Salvation, but most wound up in less responsible hands. The National Commercial Bank in the city of Gjirokaster was robbed with a tank.
Korce, near the border with Greece, was terrorized by gangs of masked men. Outside Fier, on the seacoast plain, twenty people died in a shootout between criminals and armed villagers. The southern port of Vlore was taken over by a gangster chief named Ramazan Causchi, who preferred to be called “the Sultan.”
At least fourteen thousand Albanians tried to escape to Italy by commandeering boats. One thousand two hundred people squashed into a single purloined freighter. The president of the country himself, Sali Berisha, stole a ferry to send his son and daughter to Brindisi, Italy. Prison guards deserted and six hundred inmates broke out of Tirana’s central prison. Among the escapees was the head of Albania’s Communist Party, the wonderfully named Fatos Nano. (Nano exhibited the pattern of recidivism common to ex-convicts by campaigning hard during Albania’s elections in June 1997. He is now prime minister.)
U.S. Marines and Italian commandos evacuated foreign nationals by helicopter. Humanitarian aid ceased. The International Committee of the Red Cross threw up its hands. “This is almost like Somalia,” said an ICRC official. In four months more than fifteen hundred people died and tens of thousands were injured. Theft slipped into pillage. The railroad to Montenegro was stolen—the track torn up and sold for scrap. Pillage degenerated into vandalism. Schools, museums, and hospitals were wrecked. And vandalism reached heroic scale. Bridges were demolished, water-supply pumping stations were blown apart, power lines and telephone wires were pulled down. Albania came to bits.
I went to Albania in July 1997. Flying over the Albanian Alps on the trip from Rome to Tirana, I could see that something was historically wrong with Albania. The villages are not tucked into the fertile, sheltered valleys the way the villages of Austria, Switzerland, or even Bosnia are. The villages of Albania are right up on the treeless, soilless, inconvenient mountaintops. Before ski lifts were invented, there was only one reason to build homes in such places. A mountaintop is easy to defend.
The Tirana airport had one runway and a small, shabby, whitewashed concrete terminal building with a random planting of flowers outside. There were no visa or immigration formalities. Presumably, few people were trying to sneak into Albania to get social benefits. Customs agents did run my bag through an X-ray, however. Searching for something to steal, I guess. With all the ordnance available in Albania, they couldn’t be looking for weapons.
I’d found a translator and driver by calling the Hotel Tirana and hiring the front-desk clerk’s boyfriend. I’ll call him Elmaz. He met me in the airport parking lot in his uncle’s worn-out Mercedes. Elmaz said Tirana was thirty minutes away. We drove toward town on a four-lane turnpike that—“Five kilometers long,” said Elmaz—promptly ended. “Is only highway in country,” said Elmaz. The buckled, pitted two-lane road that followed was full of cars, trucks, and horse carts—an amazing number of them for such a supposedly obliterated economy. Scores of wrecked trucks and cars lined the road. Albania has so many wrecks that all the horse carts are fitted with automobile seats, some with center consoles and luxurious upholstery.
The landscape was the Mediterranean usual, a little too sun-baked and sublimely mountained for its own good. The fields, however, were only half-sown in midsummer, and out in those fields and up along the hillsides were hundreds of cement hemispheres. Each dome was about eight feet across and had a slit along the base. All the slits faced the road. It seemed to be a collection of unimaginative giant penny banks.
These are self-defense bunkers. Elmaz said there are 150,000 of them in the country. They’re everywhere you look. They are Albania’s salient feature. The shop at the Hotel Tirana sells alabaster miniatures as souvenirs—model igloos, though the gun slots seem to indicate flounder-shaped Eskimos. In the cities, some of the bunkers have cement flower planters molded onto their tops, a rare combination of civil defense and gardening. Larger bunkers appear along the beaches and at other strategic spots. The mountains are riddled with fortified tunnels, and even the stakes in Albania’s vineyards are topped with metal spikes so that paratroopers will be impaled if they try to land among the grapevines.
Albania’s longtime Communist leader Enver Hoxha (pronounced Howard Johnsonish: “Hoja”) ordered all this after the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was sure Albania was going to be invaded next. Hoxha called for “war against imperialism, against the bourgeoisie, social democrats, national chauvinists, and modern revisionists … They hurl all sorts of foul invectives on us. This gladdens us and we say: Let them go to it! Our mountains soar up higher and higher!”
But who’d want to invade Albania? Or so I was thinking as Elmaz and I drove past Albania’s Coca-Cola bottling plant. There, peeking out from behind a ten-foot fiberglass Coke bottle on the roof, was a sandbagged machine-gun nest. Maybe Hoxha wasn’t crazy.
In the event, the pillboxes were no use against the force that actually invaded Albania, which was the force of ideas—though not exactly the same ideas that sparked the Declaration of Independence, to judge by what Elmaz showed me over the next week. Elmaz was studying to be a veterinarian. Everything had been stolen from his school: books, drugs, lab equipment, even parts of the buildings themselves. “We are without windows, without doors,” said Elmaz. “We study with only desks and walls.” The desks had been stolen, too, but the faculty had found them in local flea markets and bought them back. “All the horses we have were shot,” said Elmaz.
Across the road from the veterinary school was a collective farm that once had five thousand cattle. “They stole five thousand cows!” I said, amazed at the sheer get-along-little-doggy virtuosity needed to rustle a herd that size in Albanian traffic.
“No, no, no,” said Elmaz. “They could never steal so many cows in 1997.”
“How come?”
“Because they were all stolen in 1992 when communism ended.”
How could mere confidence games lead to total havoc? And why did pyramid schemes run completely out of control in Albania? It took about an hour to find out. Elmaz drove me to see Ilir Nishku, editor of the country’s only English-language newspaper, the Albanian Daily News.
“Why were the pyramids so popular in Albania?” I asked Nishku. “Were people just unsophisticated about money after all those years of communist isolation?”
“No,” said Nishku, “there had been pyramid schemes already elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and they had collapsed before the Albanian ones were started. People in Albania knew about such things as the failure of the MMM scheme in Russia.”
“Then how did so many Albanians get suckered in?” I asked.
And the answer was simple. “People did not believe these were real pyramid schemes,” Nishku said. “They knew so much money could not be made honestly. They thought there was smuggling and money laundering involved to make these great profits.”
The Albanians didn’t believe they were the victims of a scam. They believed they were the perpetrators—this being so different from the beliefs of certain Wall Street bull-market investors in the United States.
“My family had two thousand dollars in the pyramid schemes,” said Elmaz. It was their entire savings.
Nishku told me the first Albanian pyramid scheme was started in 1991 by Hadjim Sijdia. Sijdia Holdings offered 5 percent or 6 percent interest per month, 60 percent to 72 percent a year—way too much, especially considering that Albania was then in a period of low inflation. But Sijdia Holdings had some real investments, and although Hadjim Sijdia was jailed in Switzerland for fraud, he managed to get out and somehow repay his debts.
Following Sijdia Holdings, however, came schemes with a primary business of scheming. There were about nine large pyramids in Albania. Three of them—Sude, Xhaferri, and Populli—had no real assets at all. By 1993 small-business owners had gotten the idea and began creating mini-pyramids all over the country. Free enterprise can be free of all sorts of things, including ethics, and competition drove the promised rates of return high and higher. At one point the Sude pyramid was offering interest of 50 percent a month.
“The pyramid schemes,” said Ilir Nishku, “created the idea that this is the free market and just four years after communism, we could get rich. They created the wrong idea that this is capitalism.”
“Everyone was sitting in cafés,” said Elmaz.
Albania’s economic statistics looked great: 9.6 percent growth in 1993, 8.3 percent in ‘94, 13.3 percent in ‘95, 9.1 percent in ‘96.
“Albania’s economy chalks up the fastest growth rate on the continent,” chirped the slightly clueless Bradt travel guide.
The very clueless United Nations 1996 Human Development Report for Albania declared, “The progress in widespread economic well-being reported in the 1995 Human Development Report for Albania has continued, forming a social basis for human development.”
Something called the Eurobarometer Survey said the Albanians were the most optimistic people of eastern and central Europe.
Even Enver Hoxha’s ancient widow, Nexhmije (pronounced … oh, who cares), waxed positive on capitalism. Released from prison in December 1996, she had a new bathroom installed in her apartment. Jane Perlez of the New York Times interviewed the communist crone: “‘This is the good thing about the consumer society,’ [Nexhmije] said, showing off some pink Italian tiles. ‘Though it’s very expensive, you can find everything.’”
The glory days lasted until February 1997. Then five of the big pyramids collapsed, and all the little ones did. Four other major pyramid schemes quit paying interest and froze accounts. An estimated $1.2 billion disappeared, more than half the Albanian gross domestic product. “Where did all that money go?” I asked Nishku.
He began ticking off possibilities: Swiss banks? The Albanian government? Money-laundering operations in Cyprus? Turkish Mafia? Russian Mafia? Italian Mafia? “We don’t know,” he said.
I asked Nishku if there was any possibility that people would get their money back.
He said, “No.”
The best place in Albania from which to admire capitalist freedoms gone wrong is the Hotel Tirana’s balcony bar overlooking Skenderbeg Square in the center of Albania’s capital city.
“Sheshi Skenderbej” is an all-concrete piazza the size of a nine-hole golf course. A dozen streets empty into it. From each street come multitudes of drivers going as fast as they can in any direction they want. Cars head everywhere. Cars box the compass. They pull U-ies, hang Louies, make Roscoes, do doughnuts. Tires peel and skid. Bicycles scatter. Pushcarts jump the curbs. Pedestrians run for their lives. No horn goes unhonked. Brakes scream. Bumpers wallop. Fenders munch. Headlight glass plays jingle bells on the pavement. There’s lots of yelling.
Until 1990, Albanians were forbidden to own motor vehicles. They didn’t know how to drive. They still don’t. Every fourth or fifth car seems to have an AUTOSHKOLLE sign on the roof, and not a moment too soon. Now there are 150,000 automobiles in Albania. If you’ve ever wondered why you don’t see beaters and jalopies on Western European streets, why there are no EU junkyards, it’s because the junk is in Albania. Elmaz said, “When we were first open to Europe, we bought used cars. Very used cars. After one year …” He pursed his lips and made the kaput noise.
The bad cars of Europe are in Albania. And the hot cars. An unwashed Porsche 928 lurching inexpertly through the square seemed a probable example. Its huge V-8 was being gunned to piston-tossing, valve-shattering rpms. Even a mid-1980s model 928 would cost an average Albanian sixteen years’ salary.
An American wire-service reporter was teasing Elmaz about used-car shopping: “I’d like to get a Renault Twingo, maybe. A ‘95 or ‘96. For about a thousand dollars? One that hasn’t been rolled.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” said Elmaz in the kind of laugh that indicates nobody’s kidding. “I know someplace.”
The wire-service reporter, who seemed to be rather too well informed on various matters, said that pot cost thirty dollars a kilo in Albania. And the Economist magazine’s business report on Albania said that in March 1997, a fully automatic Kalashnikov assault rifle could be bought on the streets of Tirana for as little as three dollars.
“Everyone is surreptitiously armed,” said the wire-service reporter. Or not so surreptitiously. I saw a middle-aged man in civilian clothes walking along what used to be Boulevard Stalin, holding his five-year-old son by one hand and an AK-47 in the other.
Such are Second Amendment freedoms in Albania. And First Amendment freedoms lag not far behind in their extravagance. Each evening during the first weeks of July 1997, a couple hundred royalists would march into the chaos of Skenderbeg Square, bringing traffic to a new pitch of swerve and collision.
I watched the royalists set up podium and loudspeakers on the steps of a Soviet-designed cement blunder that used to be the Palace of Culture. They unfurled the heart-surgery-colored Albanian flag, bearing the image of what’s either a two-headed eagle or a very angry freak-show chicken. The royalists shouted into the microphone such things as, “We will get our votes, even by blood!” The volume was enough to drown out the loudest car crashes. Then, at greater volume yet, they played a recording of the Albanian national anthem, which is as long as a Wagner opera and sounded like it was being played by a drunken brass band.
The royalists were demonstrating on behalf of one Leka Zogu, who thinks he’s the king of Albania. He’d just been defeated (80 percent of the voters said “jo”) in a national referendum on restoring the monarchy. Not that Albania ever had a monarchy. The country wasn’t even a country until the twentieth century. It was a backwater of the Ottoman Empire from the 1400s on and a back-farther-water of the Byzantine Empire before that.
Leka Zogu’s father, Ahmed Zogu, overthrew what passed for the government in 1924, crowned himself King Zog I in 1928, pimped the country to Mussolini, and skipped into exile one step ahead of Axis occupation in 1939. Leka was two days old at the time. Since then the younger Zogu has sojourned in Rhodesia and South Africa, been thrown out of Spain over an arms-dealing scandal, and spent a brief jail stint in Thailand for gunrunning.
After an hour or so of royalist racket, Leka Zogu’s motorcade arrived, flashing the kind of suction-cup roof lights that people buy when they want you to think they belong to the volunteer fire department. This sloppy parade of Mercedes sedans shoved into the rumpus of Skenderbeg Square, and the royal himself popped out in one royal beauty of a leisure suit. Leka (in the Albanian language the definite article is a suffixed u or i so “Leka Zogu” translates as “Leka the Zog”) stood at the microphone like a big geek—six feet eight inches tall, chinless, and bubble-bellied. He mumbled a few words. (His majesty’s command of Albanian is reported to be sketchy.) Then he booked. Wide guys patted lumpy items under their clothes. All the Benzes tried to turn around at once, which would have created still worse traffic mayhem if that had been possible.
A few days before I got to Albania some of Leka’s supporters got so enthusiastic that they started a gun battle with the police. The shooting went on for fifteen minutes, although only one person was killed, because the two sides weren’t near each other. The police were in a soccer stadium several blocks from the demonstration.
Capitalism is pursued in Albania with the same zest—not to mention the same order and self-restraint—as driving, gun control, and politics.
Hundreds of cafés and bars have opened, whacked together from raw timber with the carpentry skills of 1960s hippie commune dwellers. The rude structures are built on any handy piece of open ground and “have occupied even school yards in the capital,” says the Albanian Daily News, old copies of which, along with every other form of litter, carpet the city streets. Private garbage collection is not yet up and running in Tirana, but private garbage disposal is fully operational. Every public space is covered with bags, wrappers, bottles, cans—and the booze shacks and pizza sheds that sold them.
Gardens have been obliterated by jerry-building, monuments surrounded, paths straddled, soccer pitches filled from goal to goal. The Lana River is walled from view, not that you’d want to look. The bar and café squatters have used pickaxes to make haphazard connections with waste pipes and water mains. The Lana has crossed the lexicological line between river and open sewer. And what used to be Youth Park, a huge area of downtown greenery, has become the world’s first dining and leisure shantytown.
But it’s gambling that’s the real meat and drink. It’s done on the same confounding electronic video-card-playing devices that the Pequot Indians are using to reconquer Connecticut. Albania is a country that, from 1986 to 1990, imported sewing machines, electric stoves, and hot-water heaters numbering a total of zero. And Tirana is a city with electricity as reliable as congressional-committee testimony. But there they are: the very latest examples of wallet-Hoovering technology from America, available everywhere and, through some miracle of Mafia-to-Mafia efficiency, functioning smoothly all day.
Albania is also a country where the poverty line is $143 a month for a family of four. Eighty percent of Albanians are living below that line. And what looks like 80 percent of Albanians are standing in front of bleeping, blinking games of chance feeding 100-lek coins—fifty-cent pieces—into the maw. The most common commercial sign in Tirana is AMERICAN POKER.
The second most common sign is SHITET. Appropriately. Although it actually means “for sale.” Appropriately. Or perhaps it should be “up for grabs,” whatever that is in Albanian. Maybe it’s “Amex.” I went to an American Express office to get some money, and they were completely taken aback. They would never have anything so snatchable as money right there in an office. For money you go to the Bank in the Middle of the Street. Here—everyone being surreptitiously armed—great wads of money are being waved around, some of it peculiar. I got a few greenbacks with the green on the backs more of a pants-at-a-Westport-cocktail-party shade than usual and a twenty with something dark and odd about the presidential portrait. Was Andrew Jackson in the Jackson 5?
The thousands of tape cassettes being sold in the middle of the street are counterfeit, too. At least I hope so. I’d hate to think anyone was paying royalties on Bulgarian disco and Turkish rap. The Marlboros are real, however, and cost less than they do when they fall off the back of a truck in Brooklyn. The clothes fell off a truck, too, I think, though not, unfortunately, a Brooks Brothers semi. Albanians have the Jersey Dirt Mall mode of dress figured out. Like everything else, these duds are sold midstreet, from racks mingled with car accidents, royalists, money, guns, and automated five-card draw.
Reading over what I have written, I fear I’ve made Albanians sound busy. They aren’t. Even their gambling is comparatively idle—exhibiting none of the industry shown by the old bats in Atlantic City with their neatly ordered Big Gulp cups of quarters and special slot-machine yanking gloves.
There are lots of skulking young men in groups on Tirana’s corners and plenty more driving around in cars with no apparent errand or evident destination. It’s not a mellow indolence. I saw one guy cruising in his Mercedes, an elbow out the window, a wrist cocked over the steering wheel, riding cool and low. But his trunk lid was open, and chained in the boot was a barking, gnashing, furious 150-pound German shepherd.
Men in Albania hold each other’s hands too long in greeting, a gesture that seems to have less to do with affection than disarmament. They kiss each other on the cheeks, Italian-style, but more Gotti than Gucci. Everybody stares. Nobody steps out of your way.
The Albanians have a Jolly Roger air. You could give an eye patch and a head hankie to most of the people on the street and cast them in Captain Blood. Not to demean a whole ethnic group or anything, but like most Americans, the only Albanians I’d ever heard of were Mother Teresa and John Belushi. An entire country full of Mother Teresas would be weird enough—everybody looking for lepers to wash. But imagine a John Belushi Nation—except they’re not fat, and they’re not funny.
“They’ll rob you,” said the wire-service reporter as we—pretty idle and indolent ourselves—ordered another round at the Balcony Bar. “Don’t carry your wallet.” Then a neophyte television producer walked up and announced that he’d gone out to tape some local color and hadn’t made it to the city limits before he lost a car, a TV camera, and $5,000 in cash.
A whole family lived in front of the Hotel Tirana, doing nothing. Between the hotel entrance and Skenderbeg Square was a quarter-acre patch of what used to be grass. Therein camped, from dawn to dark, a very big and fat woman; a very small and bedraggled woman; several skinny, greasy men; and approximately a dozen seriously unkempt children. The big woman spent all day spraddle-legged on a tablecloth, playing cards with the skinny men. The small woman spent all day wandering back and forth across the packed-dirt lot. Every time a hotel guest stepped outside, the children descended upon him or her, begging in a horde or, if begging was to no avail, thrusting little hands into pockets and purses, and grasping at whatever the hotel guest was carrying. Otherwise the children swatted and kicked each other. Sometimes the children would go over to the big woman, who’d also give them a swat. And if the tykes obtained money, they’d return to the big woman, and she’d snatch it.
The family had a puffy, sallow baby with the scorched blond hair that is a sign of malnutrition. The infant seemed to be eight or ten months old but didn’t appear to be able to hold its head up. It never cried. A ten- or eleven-year-old boy was the principal caretaker. He squeezed the baby to his chest with one arm while he chased the other children around, giving them karate chops and kung fu kicks. Meanwhile, the baby’s appendages wagged and jiggled in all directions.
Between martial arts exhibitions, the baby was left alone on a sheet of cardboard on Skenderbeg Square’s tumultuous sidewalks. Passersby were supposed to leave coins. Occasionally they did.
“They are Gypsies,” said Elmaz. But Gypsy is the preferred local bigotry epithet, the N-word of the Balkans, with the added advantage that it can be used on anybody darker than Kate Moss.
The translator who worked for the wire-service reporter said he’d questioned the child-care boy about the baby. The boy had said, “His mother was going to throw him away. But she gave him to us. Now we’re taking care of him.”
There is not, so far as I was able to discover, an Albanian Child Abuse Hotline. “That’s because it would be jammed with how-to calls,” said the wire-service reporter.
“What the fuck is with this place?” said someone else at the bar. And I do not have an answer for that.
All of Albania’s rich and varied social life comes to a halt promptly at 10 p.m., when the shoot-to-kill curfew began.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had sent an Italian-led contingent of some seven thousand troops to enforce it.
The OSCE troops arrived in April 1997 in their scout cars and personnel carriers. The situation in Albania was so bad that having Italians tooling around in armor-plated vehicles actually made the streets safer. Now, after 10 p.m. in Tirana, everything was quiet. No, not quiet. There was continual gunfire coming from the maze of Tirana’s back streets. And the gunfire set off Tirana’s dogs. As a result I spent the night thinking, first, about stray Kalashnikov slugs and the Hotel Tirana’a floor-to-ceiling windows: “Gosh, I wish I had a room on a lower floor.” Then thinking about what a really large number of loud dogs Tirana has: “Gosh, I wish I had a room on a higher floor.” I ended up back at the balcony bar, fully exposed to both the bullets and the barking, but at least I had gin.
Tirana was not quiet at night, but it was invisible. Nothing moved on the main streets. And most of the town’s electricity was out so I couldn’t see it moving, anyway. I gazed into a stygian void with just an occasional tracer shell arcing across the night sky. Make a wish?
Albania is a little place the size of Maryland, with a population of 3.25 million. Albania is little, and Albania is out of the way, blocked from the rest of the Balkan Peninsula by high, disorderly mountain ranges, and, until this century, cordoned from the sea by broad, malarial swamps. Seventy-five percent of the land is steeps and ravines. In the north, the Albanian Alps rise in such a forbidding confusion of precipices that they are known as the Prokletije, or Accursed Mountains. In the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon called Albania “a country within sight of Italy which is less known than the interior of America.” As late as 1910, geographical authorities were saying that certain districts of Albania “have never been thoroughly explored.” And considering the neophyte TV producer’s experience, they won’t be explored soon.
This isolated, outlandish place emerged from World War II run by the isolated and outlandish Communist guerrilla chieftain Enver Hoxha. In 1948, Hoxha broke his alliance with Tito because Yugoslavia wasn’t being pro-Soviet enough. In 1961, Hoxha broke his alliance with Khrushchev because the Soviet Union wasn’t being pro-Soviet enough. In 1978, Hoxha threw out the Red Chinese for having played Ping-Pong with the U.S. And by the time Hoxha died in 1985, Albania wasn’t on speaking terms with anyplace but North Korea and maybe the English Department at Yale. Hoxha’s successor, Ramiz Alia, stayed the loony course for a while, but in 1990, with communism going into a career slump all over the globe, Alia tried some reforms.
The Albanians’ response to a sudden introduction of personal autonomy and individual responsibility casts an interesting light on the human psyche. They ran like hell. According to Balkans expert James Pettifer, “Over 25,000 people seized ships moored in Durres Harbor and forced them to sail to Italy.” Thousands of others fled to Greece or occupied the grounds of Western embassies in Tirana. University students pulled down the gigantic gilded statue of Enver Hoxha in Skenderbeg Square, and the Alia government had to dismantle and hide the nearby statues of Stalin and Lenin. There was repeated food rioting, widespread destruction of public property, and extensive looting of everything owned by the government—and everything was.
Then things got better. Dr. Sali Berisha, whom Pettifer calls a “leading cardiologist” (Albania has a leading cardiologist?), was elected president. The Communists were jailed. In Pettifer’s words, “The new government … embarked on a program of privatization and the construction of a free-market economy.”
But this privatization being programmed and this free-market economy being constructed were based on only one industry: pyramid schemes.
Although Albania seems inaccessible, it has been, over the past three millennia, repeatedly accessed. Albanians have had the misfortune to live too close to the kind of folks who can’t seem to resist invading things—even things like Albania.
Albania has been invaded by various Greek city states, Macedonia, Rome, Byzantium, Slavic hordes, Byzantium again, Bulgarian hordes, Byzantium one more time, Normans, Christian Crusaders, Charles I of Anjou, Serbs, Venetians, Turks, and Fascists. Durres, historically the principal city of Albania, has changed hands thirty-three times since the year 1000.
Albania has been invaded, yes. Conquered, no. While the rest of the Balkan Peninsula was being Hellenized, Latinized, Slavo-fied, or Turkey-trotted, Albanians stayed Albanian. Their language is the last extant member of the Phrygo-Thracian family of tongues once spoken by peoples from the far side of the Black Sea to the eastern Adriatic.
The highland areas of Albania have been claimed by various nations but governed by none. Authority has always rested with the Mal, the Albanian word for tribe and also—to give some idea of the cozy relationship among Albanian clans—the Albanian word for the mountain that each village is on top of.
The tribalism that has disappeared from the rest of Europe (or been reduced to what tartan you wear on your golf slacks) is still a prime fact of existence in Albania. Tribal identification transcends the theological hatreds so avidly pursued in the rest of the Balkans. There are tribes with both Christian and Muslim members. “The true religion of the Albanian is being an Albanian,” said nineteenth-century nationalist Pashko Vasa.
Tribal identification transcended atheism, too. In the 1960s, twenty-eight of the fifty-two members of the Albanian Communist Party’s central committee were related by blood.
Blood being the key word. Albania is remarkable for the number and persistence of its blood feuds. As soon as a boy is of age, he is liable to become a Lord of Blood, a Zot i Gjakut, with responsibility for killing members of the clan who killed members of his clan, who killed members of their clan, and so forth—a sort of pyramid scheme of death.
Men who are “in blood” can spend years shut up inside their fortified houses. Girls, however, are let off the hook unless they swear to be virgins and wear men’s clothes. Lest anyone accuse the Albanians of utterly eschewing all rule of law, this takes place under the auspices of the Kanun Lek Dukagjini, the Law of Lek, a voluminous compendium of tribal custom and practice dating back at least to the 1400s, copies of which may be purchased at book stalls in Tirana.
According to James Pettifer, who wrote an essay on the subject for the Blue Guide to Albania, anthropologists estimate that there are some two thousand blood feuds going on in Albania and that as many as sixty thousand people are involved. (The Blue Guide is one of the few tourist manuals with a good section on the ins and outs of vendetta killing.) In 1992, a man was beheaded with an ax in a Tirana hotel lobby—revenge for a murder his father had committed in a northern village more than forty years before.
The Albanians certainly have preserved their culture. Whether this is a good idea is a question that can be decided only, of course, by Albanians. But in these times of multicultural zeal, it may be worth noting that the Albanian language did not have a proper alphabet until 1908. The country didn’t get a railroad until 1947. The first Albanian university was founded in 1957. And there is an Albanian proverb to the effect that a woman must work harder than a donkey because a donkey feeds on grass, while a woman feeds on bread.
Culture is an important factor in determining the economic success of a nation. But, that said, what else is there to say? Germany got rich with a culture as barbaric—a couple of world wars and a Holocaust prove it—as anything ever seen. Tibet stayed poor with a culture so wonderful that half of the movie stars in America want to move there. And how do you change a culture anyway? We could wire Albania for cable and let its citizens see how the rest of the world lives. Jerry Springer should give them some good ideas.
Albania did not improve upon inspection. Even the animals in the Tirana zoo had been stolen. The monkeys were gone from Monkey Island. The aviary was empty of birds. All the large ruminants had been “eaten,” said Elmaz. Only two lions, a tiger, and a wolf remained in captivity. No one had had the guts to steal them—although several young men seemed to be gearing themselves to the task. The bars on the wolf’s cage had been pried back. One young man stuck his hand inside, shouted, and snatched the hand back. The wolf ignored him, and the men went down the hall to tease the tiger and lions.
In the middle of downtown Tirana, two hundred yards from Skenderbeg Square, is a block-long hole in the ground. Garbage fires smolder at the bottom. This is where Sijdia Holdings was going to build Albania’s first Sheraton hotel with pyramid-scheme investments. Only the hole for the cellar was completed. An enclosed staircase rises from the bottom of the hole to street level where there’s a door with a neon sign above it, CLUB ALBANIA.
The nearby apartment buildings that housed the country’s Communist elite were built in the clean, austere International style of twentieth-century cities everywhere, but they’re crumbling. Where big chunks of stucco have fallen away, primitive rubble-wall construction is visible, ready to explode with the structures’ weight in the next little earthquake.
Apartments for the common folk were built much worse. Elmaz’s mother had had the unenviable job of teaching geography to students who, as far as they knew, would never be allowed to leave the country. She lived in a block of flats with four stories of haphazardly laid masonry courses. Flaking mortar oozed from every joint. The bricks looked like they’d been dug from beds of clay with canoe paddles.
The Hotel Tirana, which went up in 1979, was so badly designed that the Italian entrepreneurs who later took it over had to add a separate tower as a fire escape. Short gangways lead from the tower to an emergency exit on each floor. This outside stairway created security problems, however, so the tower was encased in steel mesh. Now if there’s a fire at the Hotel Tirana, the result will be hundreds of guests in an enormous fry basket.
Near the Lana River is a neighborhood called the Block, once reserved for Enver Hoxha’s inner circle. Their idea of luxury was semisuburban, the kind of semisuburb you’re trying to convince your parents to move out of before their car gets stolen. But the Hoxha residence looks like the house of a really successful Chicago dentist. There’s something of the Chicago prairie style to its broad but ill-proportioned windows, clumsy, deep-eaved roof, and dumpy fieldstone terracing—call it Frank Lloyd Left.
Hoxha’s daughter Pranvera is, in fact, an architect. I don’t know if the Hoxha homestead was her work, but other evidence indicates she’s at least as addled as her dad was. She designed what used to be the Enver Hoxha Memorial a couple of streets away. It is immense, concrete, and circular with steep conical exterior walls used these days for daring cardboard-under-the-butt slides by local preteens. It once contained, says the Blue Guide, “more or less everything that Hoxha ever touched or used.” It now contains the USAID office, which is more useful. I think.
Elmaz and I drove forty kilometers west of Tirana to Durres, passing a complex of greenhouses from which both houses and green had been removed. We saw two summer palaces King Zog had built for himself, completely ransacked. The very paint seemed to have been stolen off the walls.
Durres was, at the time, Albania’s only working port. And in that port were exactly two ships. One was a Chinese-built destroyer that had been “bought” from the Albanian navy. At any rate, $6,000 had changed hands. Now the Khajdi was a discotheque, paneled inside with the same rough wood used in the beer halls and gambling hells of Tirana’s Youth Park. Something had gone wrong in the bilge, however, and the Khajdi was listing so far to starboard that you felt you’d had more than enough to drink the moment you stepped inside. Business was bad, the proprietor reported.
The other ship was a beached freighter missing hawsers, hatches, portholes, and anything else that could be filched, including anchors. A couple of men had shinnied up the foremast and were trying to pry a brass knob off the top. A gang of boys ran around the deck playing pirates or, if you think about it, not actually playing. Technically speaking, they were pirates.
Elmaz said the looting had pretty much stopped, at least in the thirty or forty kilometers around Tirana. I asked him whether the OSCE force had imposed law and order. He didn’t think so. “They are just driving around and sitting in cafés like everyone else,” he said. I asked him if the government had managed to quiet things down. It didn’t have an army anymore, but it still had the secret police, actually the too-well-known police, the Sigurmi, left over from the Hoxha regime and now renamed, with euphemistic masterstroke, the National Information Service. But Elmaz didn’t think the police had done much except pester Sali Berisha’s political opponents.
“Then what stopped the looting?” I said.
“They were finished,” said Elmaz.
A little before curfew on my last night in Albania, I was sitting in a café with the wire-service reporter and a couple other fellow hacks. “Albanians are just like anybody else,” I was saying.
“They’re crazy,” said the wire-service reporter.
“No, they’re not,” I said. “They just have a different history, different traditions, a different set of political and economic circumstances. They’re acting exactly the way we would if we …”
There was an Albanian family at the next table: handsome young husband, pretty wife, baby in a stroller, cute four-year-old girl bouncing on her dad’s knee. The girl grabbed the cigarette from between her father’s lips and tried a puff. Mom and Dad laughed. Dad took the cigarette back. Then he pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, offered a fresh cigarette to the little girl, and gave her a light.