2023-09-02 22:25:27
by Francesco Battistini
It was commissioned by Hoxha, designed by his daughter and inspired by those of the pharaohs. After the fall of the regime it was a nightclub, a gym and headquarters of the NATO command in the Kosovo war. Now it will be a hub for tech startups
Like the Egyptian ones, but with less history. Like those of Mexico, but with less mystery. Like the one in the Louvre, but uglier. Seen from above, the Pyramid of Tirana has the shape of the large two-headed eagle that celebrates the Albanian flag. Seen from below, it has the shape of a small ziggurat which is lost in the center of the riverfront, the Lana.
Seen today, the cumbersome memory of a dictator and his delusions: the last European monument of the communist era – explains Leon Cika, once the regime’s grand commis -, which was erected only a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall . Today its official name would be the Pjeter Arbnori Congress Center, but no one has ever called it that also because no one knows who the constitutionalist Arbnori was anymore, while everyone remembers very well what that all-marble eco-monster that decorates the boulevard Dshmort and Kombit, the Avenue of the Martyrs of the Nation: the Pyramid the last piece still standing of Albanian Stalinism-Maoism.
A glass dome, 12 thousand square meters of stacked containers, concrete slides. The tomb of the Hoxha era. Which after so many controversies and discussions — it must be demolished, a symbol of communism!, it must be saved, an icon of the twentieth century! in the end he decided to leave it where it was. And to transform, from that mausoleum of collectivization that was, into a sanctuary of the globalization that will come.
an architectural work that has no equal, says the mayor, Erion Veliaj, and the recovery with American capital will be entrusted to a Dutch archistar, Winy Maals: trees, escalators, fountains, lots of glass that gives light. We will make it a training center for young people. To teach robotics, animation, software. Because Tirana will have to become the city of Big Data, of kids who speak Java, of IT start-ups. We want to be the Tel Aviv of the Balkans.
The Pyramid has been there since 1988. Since the most paranoid and insane dictator of Eastern Europe left it as an inheritance to the most isolated and battered people beyond the Iron Curtain. Just before his death, Enver Hoxha commissioned his daughter and son-in-law, who were architects, to do the work.
It took three years to inaugurate it, funding the very poor state coffers and putting inside a museum celebrating the Little Helmsman, blow-ups and historical phrases, a stone’s throw from the presidential and government palaces. In that Albania cut off from the world, no one was too surprised by such megalomania. And in any case, no one said a word: it was a regime that in forty years had silenced six thousand dissidents, hanging them. And as for madness, he raised statues to Hoxha and had already built 750,000 bunkers almost everywhere, to defend himself against highly improbable Soviet, Chinese, Italian invasions…
It was a car-free Tirana where on the avenue of the Martyrs mostly donkey carts passed, the mosques were closed because atheism was the state and the marvelous čaršija, the ancient Ottoman market, had been razed to the ground because the market was a western plague.
With the fall of communism, it was a miracle if the Pyramid of Hoxha was not picked with pickaxes: looted and emptied, in the 90s Gianni Amelio used it to tour Lamerica and journalists to make it an easy metaphor for the collapsed financial pyramids, which they were rocking the country. Over the decades, the Pyramid remained abandoned to various fates.
The kids began to use the downhill walls for skateboarding. Then the pimps arrived, taking advantage of the dark halls for a night club with the inevitable name, The Mummy. Then it was the turn of the NATO forces, with the Kosovo war, which installed a command to monitor refugees. Finally, a TV set, radio studios, gradually a large number of stray cats and dogs entered.
The first to want to demolish it was Sali Berisha, the eternal former president. The first to defend it was Edi Rama, the current premier. And when real estate speculation started to make us a new parliament, a national theater or an altar of the homeland, when the Saudis came forward to take it over with a check for one hundred million euros, it was then that the Schipetara eagle proudly reopened its wings, willing to defend her past however tragic: Facebook groups, petitions, protests. Now, the last idea: in this summer of rediscovered Albaniaa destination for low-cost tourists and premiers on vacation, why not make the sarcophagus of Hoxha an occasion for rebirth?
Paraphrasing Napoleon: Albanians, forty years of history are watching you from the top of this pyramid. Make sure you do things right.
September 2, 2023 (change September 2, 2023 | 22:03)
© Time.News
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