Hoxha's villa

Walking along Rruga Ismail Qemali in the Blok district in central Tirana, with its cafes and restaurants, its relaxed couples out for a stroll, it is hard to imagine that two decades ago this was a closed area, a district of villas, the preserve of the communist elite. That Blok is almost gone, a strange past world almost unimaginable in the bustling city of today, wiped out and replaced by blocks of flats, bars and nightclubs. But between the cafes is a quiet, sombre building, set in an overgrown garden, its terraces empty, its closed shutters slightly dilapidated, gently slipping into decay. A rather sad relic of the ‘70s, consciously luxurious, yet with an air of cheap, low-grade materials about it, and completely out of place now.

Hoxha's villa

And if the building has a somewhat ghostly appearance on the outside, on the inside the haunted feel is palpable. For this was the home of the late Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha. How strange to walk through the rooms where he walked. To stand by the bed he slept in, the desk he worked at, the toilet he sat on, to browse through his books. The house has not been much changed, the remaining furniture and pictures mostly as they were when he was alive. It has been poorly maintained, the damp leaking through the ceilings. No museum this, left alone by a country uncertain what to do with this relic of a painful, unmourned past, but an important and undeniable part of the country’s history for all that.

The building was for a while used to accommodate visiting international delegations. The late Kosovo President, Ibrahim Rugova, slept in Hoxha’s bed, our guide informed us. A colleague told me he slept in the building during a work trip to Albania in the 1990s. He didn’t sleep well, which he jokingly put down to a malign presence.

But joking aside, the place does feel creepy. Eerily quiet now, unpenetrated by the noise of the present-day Blok. The wider Hoxha family lived here, his children with their families, a sister whose husband some believe Hoxha himself had killed. They each had their self-contained apartment. To an extent, the building is like a museum to 1970s design. Isolated from the world Albania may have been, but the elite was in touch with the fashions of the day in the capitalist west. The style is fairly uniform throughout, with just the colours conforming to individual tastes. Some of the tiles, including the green floral pattern in the dictator’s own bathroom, are quite attractive. In a couple of the bedrooms huge posters cover most of a wall, much like many teenagers in the west decorated their private spaces. Almost a normal family perhaps? Who knows?

Quiet and uninhabited now, it is hard to imagine how this family home might once have been. It was not only a family home. Downstairs are offices and reception rooms, a large dining room. But on the two upper floors are the private apartments. Hoxha and his wife had neighbouring apartments, with connecting double doors. What kind of family was this? Was there the noise of children? Did young people play music on their radios or cassette players? What kind of father, uncle, grandfather was Hoxha?

In Hoxha’s apartment, some of the walls are lined with books, mainly in French. Like Pol Pot, Hoxha had studied and learned his communist beliefs in Paris. An interesting, eclectic collection, for a man much interested in political and social theory, not just the standard communist tomes. Among them his own works.

To outsiders, the Albania of the Hoxhas is fascinatingly mysterious, in an almost voyeuristic way. When asked, even Albanians who lived through it seem to find it hard to conjure it up now, a world that has become impossibly alien, but which once really existed. The isolation, the personality cult, the ever-present fear, and the everyday lives that ordinary people carried on despite it all.

Yet to those who lived through it, who were not part of the privileged elite of the Blok, what does this house mean now? Our guide was one of those who suffered at Hoxha’s hands, her father a purged general, the family sent into internal exile in a remote region. Should it be restored as a museum, a monument to that time? For now, it is just left to decay, a gloomy presence which is hardly even noticed by the people who walk past it, or who sit on the café terraces, sipping their drinks, listening to western pop music. The world of the decadent west from which Hoxha tried to isolate his people, but whose styles and fashions he incorporated into his own home.