LLEGO A TIRANA, EL BÚNKER DE LA DICTADURA | ALBANIA #13

I've arrived in Tirana after two hours by car, which is quite pleasant. In general, the roads in Albania are super good. I haven't had any problems in the whole country, except maybe if you go to the Albanian Alps, but there I preferred not to take my car. And I'm already in the center. Tirana is a pretty big city, it has about 500,000 inhabitants, more or less, that is, one in every six people in the country lives here. And that's it, it's a pretty big city, but the most characteristic part, the most visitable or the most interesting, is in the central part. There is a giant square, which is Skanderbeg Square, which is where I just arrived. That's why I've taken the hotel where I'm staying tonight, which I'll show you later, it's still too early to do the check-in. I've taken it here, very close, a minute walking from the square, to save me all this time traveling, not having to take taxis and such, so I recommend that you choose a hotel in this area, there is a lot of offer, and so you will save a lot of time. And I'm going to show you a little the possibilities you have, if you are going to be 24 hours in the capital. As I have told you, now I am in Skanderbeg Square, which is the neurological center of the Albanian city. It is huge, it has a surface of 10 hectares, that is, it is very very large. The ground is super nice, as you can see, it is not totally homogeneous, but it has tiles of different colors, and they are different types of marble and stone, which have been brought from different corners of Albania. And the name of Skanderbeg comes from the statue you are seeing now, which is, well, I have already told you about Skanderbeg, one of the main figures in Albanian history, because it stopped the Ottoman troops for a long time. I have coincided with a festival that they are organizing here, which is the Spring Festival. I don't know when it will be held, but well, it looks like the typical festival in which they set up a lot of souvenir stands or handicrafts, places to eat outdoors. So I imagine that there are also concerts and similar events. So nothing, it looks very good, it seems that there will be a lot of atmosphere. At the moment it is very early and they are setting up everything, so nothing, I will come later to see if all the stands are already set up and to see a little what's going on. Skanderbeg, Albania In the eastern part of the square there is a giant building, which is the Palace of Culture, and it houses three different institutions. On one side there is the Opera, there is also the National Library and the Ballet Theatre. It is a giant building, it has a quite curious architecture, but the saddest thing is that it was built in the 60s, during the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, during his hermetic communism, and for the construction of it one of the oldest mosques in the city collapsed, in addition to the entire old bazaar that was located in this area, as part of, as I mentioned in previous chapters, the eradication or elimination of religious symbols. In one of the corners of the square there is the Zembe Mosque, which is the most important mosque in the entire city, and it is not for less, it is a mosque of the 18th century, it has some impressive frescoes in everything that is the facade, and it is also very important because it managed to survive, as I have already mentioned several times, this elimination of places of worship to any of the religions by communism of the 20th century. This mosque in particular was able to be saved from all that elimination, so it is of greater importance today. I highly recommend that you enter inside the mosque, because inside it is impressive, you can see that it is from the 18th century, you can see the antiquity in the architecture, but also that the frescoes are impressive, it is very very beautiful, it is small, very small, but it is super super cool. Here next to the square there is a bunker, you can see that I am entering, I am inside what is the dome of the bunker, it is spectacular, the bunkers were very typical in the communist era here in Albania. Kember Hoxha, during the 47 years that he was in power, had a great paranoia, and he thought that all the countries wanted to invade him, so to protect himself from all those possible invasions, he built these bunkers, but in record time, he had an army of people, of prisoners mainly, who had them building bunkers all over the country constantly, in case this imminent attack of any other country happened, since according to him, everyone wanted to attack him. As I already mentioned, the communist dictatorship of Kember Hoxha was very hard, at first it even got along very well with other communist regimes, such as the Soviet Union or the Chinese, but even with them it ended up getting along quite badly. At first it supported a lot of ideas, such as Stalin's, but then it started to get along badly with the next leaders, such as Khrushchev in Russia, they didn't get along so well, so it separated itself from him and Mao's lines in China, and ended up being left alone, that's why it became one of the most hermetic countries in the world, because it had no relation with any other country, and it didn't want to have any influence from any of them. The Communist Era During the communist era, which lasted up to 47 years, up to 170,000 bunkers were built all over the country, there were different types, there were the underground types, and then there were also buildings, and those that were already in more areas, such as the mountains. This is one of the first underground ones, it was built between 1984 and 1986, but it never had any use. This was a bunker that was designed for a planned nuclear or chemical attack, and everything was prepared here, in case they had to come the mandatory underground, such as the one in Berfoxa, and they had everything prepared, with about 26 rooms, for all kinds of administration posts, for emergencies, etc., in case it was seen. It was never used, not even for training. Here we have the friend in Berfoxa, who made so much good to this country, and this is a kind of office, that he had set up here, in case he needed to use it, with his phone, his MacBook Pro, his iPhone, and here a small library. During all this time, there were two types of different security, on one side there was the National Police, which was a more professional police, and on the other side, there was the border patrol, to prevent people from escaping, or people from outside, illegal immigrants, or Albanians who wanted to come back. Their mission was to prevent these things from happening, in fact, it is estimated that they killed more than a thousand people, who simply tried to escape from Albania. In fact, illegal immigrants were considered as saboteurs, that's why they didn't want to come in, because, as Berfoxa had this rule, that all countries wanted to invade them, or that they wanted to have some kind of influence over them, to conquer them, he avoided this, that there was no contact or communication with the outside. And the other type of security was the State Security, also known as SIGURID. They were policemen, but they acted in a covert way, they were like countrymen, to try to detect other civilians, who were against the regime, who would say bad comments, who would have political ideas contrary to those of the regime, what usually happens in all dictatorships. They try to identify all the people who think they are against the power and who want to organize themselves to rise up or whatever, they identify them, they detain them, and they can take them to jail for life, or even, on many occasions, they were executed. The problem of the security was that most of the time they were chivatos, they were normal people from the town, who were dedicated to other things, and among them was being a chivato of neighbors, family, friends, who did anything to be able to identify them and take them to the police. And why were they going to do it if they were friends or family? Because for each area, and for each security group, there was a state policeman who controlled them. If the policeman in charge of the area finds out that one of the people he has as a secret policeman is not doing his job well, the one they detain and execute is the same. So they created a society in which you couldn't trust anyone, you couldn't express your opinion, you couldn't say anything that was out of the norm, because if you didn't, you had the risk that whoever you were talking to was going to be a chivato who was going to report you. In fact, it is estimated that in all this time, if the population of the country was about 800,000, the security was about 200,000. One out of four people was a chivato. So it is very difficult in this way to have a trusted area. In total, in all this time, more than 6,000 people were executed, either by shooting or hanging, they were the most typical methods of people who had identified as against the regime for this security and for these chivatos. In this room where I am, there are the names of all the people who executed and that in fact their bodies, when they were executed, they did not return them to their relatives because they wanted to avoid that they began to be buried in areas that were considered as politically executed and became places of pilgrimage for those who were against the regime and that would help to gain power. This is a ministerial room whose use was more administrative in case when they already had to use the bunker and something serious happened, to be able to manage them from here. In fact, here at the table there are three phones, each of a different color, as you see, and each had a different use. The red phone was used when there was a serious problem, the white phone is that there was a solution and the black phone is that the problem had already been solved. There are many testimonies in video in these rooms, even here. For example, a man speaks that when they needed to accuse someone of something, they simply invented a witness. They said, hey, you accuse this one. He was going to a trial and did, without ever knowing each other, he said, yes, I met him two years ago and he made that kind of comments and with that testimony they could already execute someone or torture him, as it comes here. There are 36 methods of torture that they used to make confessions, most of them false, of the people they wanted to accuse. I'm going through here for chemical or nuclear pollution showers that they created just in case. Like the rest of the bunker, it was never used, but it is part of that paranoia they had. In fact, it is difficult to open these doors, I imagine they were closed here and there. Here there are different types, there are some blue ones, but it is scary to simply enter here. Look, here are the showers, but on the entrance there is the little thing. Super recommended to visit the bunker, I tell you, throughout the country there are 170,000 to visit. Obviously most are not open, but hey, if you are here in Tirana, it is very worth visiting this one, although it was never used, it has a lot of documentation of everything that is in general of the 20th century, because it starts from practically the Balkan Wars, since 1912 when Albania achieved its independence and goes all the way to the end of the dictatorship.