Hoxha
For forty-five years Enver Hoxha governed Albania as the most isolated state in Europe, breaking with Yugoslavia in 1948, the Soviet Union in 1961 and finally China in 1978, until the country stood alone on principle. In 1967 religion was abolished outright and Albania declared itself the world's first atheist state. From 1967 to 1986 the country was bunkered: the famous figure of 750,000 was Hoxha's target, not a count, and the best-evidenced number is 173,371 completed by 1983. The exact total is unknown.
Part of Albania
40 moments in this segment.
- - Sejfulla Malëshova speaking as minister of culture. Sejfulla Malëshova addressing an audience in 1945, when he was minister of culture in the new communist government. He argued for a broader cultural policy, lost the argument in 1946 and spent the rest of his life in internal exile.
- - HMS Volage with her bow blown off. HMS Volage after striking a mine in the Corfu Channel in October 1946. Two British destroyers were mined and forty-four sailors killed; the case went to the new International Court of Justice and left Albania and Britain without relations for decades.
- - Mine swept from the Corfu Channel. British sailors drag ashore a mine swept from the Corfu Channel on 12 December 1946. The sweeping operation, carried out in waters Albania claimed, deepened the crisis it was meant to resolve.
- - Hoxha addresses the Fourth Party Congress. Enver Hoxha speaking to the Fourth Congress of the Party of Labour in 1961, the meeting held as relations with Khrushchev's Soviet Union collapsed. English subtitles carry the address.
- - Army exercises in communist Albania. Troops on exercise in the 1970s. After the split with China at the end of the decade Albania faced the prospect of defending itself with no ally at all.
- - Surface-to-air missile crew in training. An Albanian missile crew training in the 1970s. Air defence mattered to a state that expected invasion from every direction at once.
- - MiG fighters of the Albanian air force. Soviet-built MiG fighters of the Albanian air force in the 1970s, kept flying long after Moscow had cut off spare parts.
- - The beach at the Hotel Adriatiku, Durrës. Sand, sea and the Hotel Adriatiku on the Durrës shore in the 1970s. The state travel agency Albturist funnelled the few permitted foreign visitors into a handful of coastal hotels like this one.
- - An Albanian minister lands in Athens. Commerce minister Nadim Hoxha arrives in Athens in March 1977 for trade and scientific talks with Greek officials. Contact of this kind was unusual for a state that had shut itself off from most of Europe.
- - A German group at the theatre of Butrint. West German visitors sit in the ancient theatre at Butrint in September 1978. Group tours under close escort were almost the only way outsiders saw Albania in the years of self-imposed isolation.
- - Military parade of the People's Army. A parade of the Albanian People's Army in the 1980s. Enver Hoxha's Albania kept one of the most militarised societies in Europe, with universal service and a civil-defence system built around the bunkers.
- - Albanian women in uniform. Women in military uniform during the communist period. The regime made a doctrine of women's participation in the army and in production, while political life stayed firmly closed.
- - Norwegian television inside closed Albania. NRK's report 'Albania is still going its own way', shown on 3 October 1982. It is a rare outside look at daily life and official display in a country that admitted almost no Western press.
- - Hoxha takes the May Day salute in Tirana. Enver Hoxha reviews the annual workers' parade in Tirana, filmed around 1983. May Day was one of the regime's fixed set pieces of mass display.
- - Hoxha turns on the oil ministry. At a 1983 plenum Enver Hoxha confronts oil industry officials over missed production targets and money unaccounted for. The exchange shows economic shortfall being handled as political guilt.
- - Forty years of socialism, filmed by the state. A documentary made by Albanian television in 1984 for the fortieth anniversary of the socialist state, showing construction projects, the Party and Enver Hoxha's leadership entirely in the regime's own terms.
- - State funeral of Enver Hoxha. The state funeral of Enver Hoxha in 1985. He had led Albania since 1944, breaking with Yugoslavia, then the Soviet Union, then China, and leaving the country almost entirely isolated.
- - The last winter of Enver Hoxha. Previously unseen footage from the winter and spring of 1985 showing Enver Hoxha in his final months, including New Year with his family. He died that April after four decades in power.
- - Lapidar at Bërzhitë. A concrete partisan monument at Bërzhitë near Tirana, photographed in 2001. Many lapidars were damaged or abandoned in the decade after 1990.
- - Monument near Barmash, Kolonjë. A war monument on the upland road near Barmash in the Kolonjë district of southern Albania, photographed in 2004.
- - Bunker mentality. Cris Dupont and Thomas Logoreci travelled through Albania in 2004 to film the abandoned defensive bunkers of the Hoxha years, built in their hundreds of thousands. The film treats the concrete domes as ordinary furniture of the landscape rather than as curiosities.
- - The grave of Enver Hoxha at Sharrë. Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, lies in the Sharrë public cemetery outside Tirana. His remains were removed from the Martyrs' Cemetery in 1992, after the fall of the system he built.
- - The T-33 wreck in Gjirokaster castle. The remains of a United States Air Force T-33 stand inside the castle of Gjirokaster. Forced down in 1957, the aircraft was displayed for decades as proof of American aggression against socialist Albania.
- - Opening a leadership bunker to visitors. An agency report filmed on 2 April 2016 inside one of the shelters built to keep the communist leadership alive through a nuclear attack. Parts of that apparatus are now open to anyone who buys a ticket.
- - Hoxha's nuclear bunker opens to visitors. Filmed in Tirana in December 2016 as the leadership's anti-nuclear shelter reopened as a museum of political persecution. Its rooms now hold displays on four decades of surveillance and internment.
- - Houses and monument in the centre of Krumë. The centre of Krumë with its monument among ordinary houses. In small Albanian towns the lapidar was usually the only piece of public sculpture.
- - Lapidar south of Bajram Curri. A monument on the road south of Bajram Curri, in the mountains of Tropojë. The town itself is named after a leader of the early independence movement.
- - Lapidar in the mountain village of Gjinar. A monument to the wartime resistance in Gjinar, a village in the hills above Elbasan. Even remote settlements were given a lapidar naming their dead.
- - What to do with 750,000 bunkers. Aeon's 'Mushrooms of Concrete', directed by Martijn Payens, on the concrete domes Hoxha scattered across the country and what has become of them. They were poured for a war that never came and cannot easily be removed.
- - The main square of Memaliaj. The central square of Memaliaj, a town built around a coal mine opened in the 1940s. Its layout and buildings are a straightforward record of socialist-era planning in southern Albania.
- - Inside Hoxha's secret villa and bunker. Top Channel's 'Gjurme Shqiptare' examines the hidden villa and the command bunker prepared for Enver Hoxha in case of war, and asks how many labourers died building them. The complex stayed unknown to the public for decades.
- - Inside the submarine pen and the airbase. A walk through abandoned military installations of the communist decades, among them a rock-cut submarine shelter on the coast and a disused air base with its aircraft left behind. They were built against an invasion that never came.
- - The economics of self-reliance. An examination of how communist Albania tried to build a closed, self-supplying economy after breaking with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and finally China, and what that policy cost. It draws on Blendi Fevziu's biography of Enver Hoxha.
- - Partisan memorial in Berat. The partisan memorial in Berat, the town where the National Liberation Front formed its provisional government in October 1944.
- - Lapidar at Peza e Vogël. A partisan monument at Peza e Vogël, near the village where the National Liberation Movement held its founding conference in September 1942. Thousands of such lapidars were raised across Albania between the 1960s and the 1980s.
- - Martyrs' cemetery at Kuc. The Martyrs' Cemetery below the village of Kuc. Every district in Albania was given a cemetery like this for its partisan dead, laid out with the same star and the same rows of identical stones.
- - Hoxha, the dictator next door. An Italian documentary on Enver Hoxha, the ruler across the Adriatic whose regime shaped four decades of Albanian life and whose repression is still argued over. It follows his rise and the apparatus he built around himself.
- - Memorial at the Qafë Prush crossing. A memorial at the Qafë Prush pass on the border between Has in Albania and Kosovo. The crossing was closed for most of the communist period and reopened only after 1990.
- - Partisan memorial at Krumë. The partisan memorial in Krumë, the small highland centre of the Has district. Monuments to the wartime resistance were built in almost every Albanian town.
- - Bust of Havzi Nela, Kukes. The bust of the teacher and poet Havzi Nela outside the school named after him in Kukes. Nela was hanged in 1988, the last public execution in communist Albania, for verses and views the state judged hostile.
