Before I touched down at Tirana International Airport, my knowledge of the Balkan enclave of Albania had, embarrassingly, been restricted to its history of isolationist Communism and the fact that it is where Mother Teresa traced her roots. As the plane’s wing swept over the Adriatic Sea’s prismatic cerulean blues, I experienced a quicksilver wave of nervous-yet-excited energy. It’s unusual for me to visit a place sight unseen; I’m usually neck-deep in research, restaurant lists and random facts. For lack of time, I had to hand over control to my travel partner, leaving my imagination to give form to this vague territory. But the images and narratives it managed to summon hardly came close to the layered story of a European anachronism: the continent’s poorest country once disfigured by authoritarianism and closed to outsiders, reshaping itself as a cosmopolitan democracy and preparing for the inevitable tourism boom.
This story is from the December 2019 - January 2020 edition of Verve.
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This story is from the December 2019 - January 2020 edition of Verve.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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