On the Shores of the Mediterranean

Albania Stern and Wild

From Cetinje we travelled down to Virpasar on the shores of Lake Shkodër by a very minor road through the Kremenica Mountains. There we waited for Tour Group ALB 81/6, the group with which we were to visit Albania, group travel being the only permitted form of travel in the country, to arrive in a bus from the airport at Titograd, which they did at a quarter to eleven at night. We now numbered thirty-four people – English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish from both sides of the border who didn’t mix with one another, three Canadians, a New Zealand lady and a German boy with a fine, full beard, apparently anxious to try out the Albanian barbering facilities. No Americans were allowed into Albania, no Russians, no Chinese, no Yugoslavs, nobody with ‘writer’ or ‘journalist’ inscribed in his or her passport, no males with long hair or beards, unless ‘with a large shaven area between sideboards and start of beard … should authorities not be satisfied in this respect beards will be cut by the barber on arrival’. No mini-skirts, maxis, flared trousers, no bright colours (‘People may be asked to change,’ although a couple of girls defiantly flaunting forbidden, folklorique maxi-skirts were not). No Bibles, since a bold band of Evangelists, having pondered the possibility of dropping Bibles on the by-that-time officially Godless Albanians in a free fall from a chartered aircraft, had decided to join a tour and deliver them in person. No Korans, either.

While eating dinner – soup with what looked like weeds in it from the lake and the worst sort of Balkan rissoles – we observed our new companions, wondering, as they were too presumably, who among us were revisionists, anti-revisionists, who was representing MI6, the CIA and similar organizations, and which ones were writers and journalists in disguise.

Meanwhile, the Tour Leader went over all the other things we weren’t to do in addition to wearing beards and skirts of forbidden lengths while in Albania. There seemed an awful lot.

‘What happens if I die in Albania?’ asked a fragile septuagenarian with her mouth full of rissole.

‘There’s a hot line to the French Ambassador in Tirana [Tirana is the capital of Albania]. He takes over. It shouldn’t hold us up much.’

Next morning the sun rose out of the mist over the lake, looking like a large tangerine, silhouetting the rugged peaks of Albania the Mysterious, away on the far side of it.

It was market day at Virpasar and the market was taking place under the trees at the end of a causeway which crossed a little arm of the lake. Every moment more and more people were arriving with their mules and donkeys, driving or riding them along the causeway, the women wearing white head-dresses, and white skirts with white pantaloons under them. Others, fishermen and their wives, all dressed in black, were arriving by water in narrow, pointed boats with their outboards roaring. There were also a number of young Albanian men with the same razor-sharp noses with moustaches to match that had made the late King Zog of Albania such a memorable figure. With their white felt skull caps they looked rather like bald-headed eagles. Two of these young men were being subjected to a prolonged interrogation by a couple of grim-looking Yugoslav policemen. There are large numbers of expatriate Albanians living in Yugoslavia on the periphery of Albania and at this particular time most of these areas were in a state of ferment. In fact much of Kosovo-Metohija, an autonomous region in southwest Serbia, abutting on northern Albania, with a population of about a million Albanians, was in a state of revolt, under martial law, and foreigners were forbidden to enter it.

Within a matter of minutes I, too, found myself being subjected to an equally severe interrogation, having been arrested for photographing the naval base when in fact I had been photographing a rather jolly-looking lady who was crossing a bridge on a donkey on the way to the market.

We set off for Albania in a Yugoslav tourist bus, crossing the lake by a causeway which carries the main road and the railway from Bar, the port on the Adriatic coast, to Titograd, the present capital of Montenegro. Then after a bit we turned off on to a lesser road, which leads to the frontier between Yugoslavia and Albania. It ran through a wide plain at the foot of bare limestone mountains in which sheep were being shepherded by women wearing the same white outfits the women had worn in the market at Virpasar, and there were a lot of market gardens. We sat in front next to the driver and he said that most of these people were Albanian Catholics and very hard-working.

The road crossed a saddle and an inlet of Shkodër Lake was revealed. Green watermeadows extended to the water’s edge, in which willows were growing in the shallows. The water was greenish-blue, choked with aquatic lotus, and beds of reeds inhabited by egrets and white herons extended far out into it. Men were fishing in the channels between them and women were working from their narrow boats, gathering water chestnuts. There are carp in the lake which weigh forty pounds or more and which, when smoked, are regarded as a great delicacy. According to the driver, sardines enter it to spawn by way of a river from the Adriatic, of which it was once an inlet. Beyond the lake, to the south-west, were the ragged tops of the Krajina Rumija mountains. Along the roadside scarlet-flowering pomegranates grew. It was a cloudless day. The atmosphere was already incandescent with heat. The lake shimmered in the haze. To the left bare hills rose steeply, shutting off the view of the mountains further inland. There was not a house to be seen. Rich Italians came here in winter to shoot wildfowl. It was an eerie place, as almost all places close to frontiers seem to be, perhaps by association of ideas. The coach radio emitted blasts of outlandish music which the driver said was Albanian.

The Yugoslav customs house was on another, longer, deeper inlet of the lake, called the Humsko Blato, which was about as wide as the Thames at Westminster. White buoys down the middle of it marked the frontier.

Forty yards or so down the road beyond the Yugoslav customs house was the Albanian one, near a hamlet called Han-i-Hotit where, in the time of the Ottomans, there was a han, a caravanserai.

Here, while we waited on the Yugoslav side, the Tour Leader told us that the Albanians would take from us any literature of an even faintly political character and all newspapers if we tried to take them into Albania and that the Yugoslavs would do the same if we tried to do the same with any Albanian literature when leaving. Here, a lady who was a member of the group asked if she could use the lavatory in the Yugoslav customs house, the door of which stood invitingly open, revealing a pastel-coloured suite, and was told brusquely by an official that she couldn’t, and must wait until she got to Albania.

Also waiting to cross was the Albanian football team, on its way back to Tirana from Vienna, after having been defeated in the European Championships. We felt sorry for them. They looked so woebegone in their shabby, variegated clothes, nothing like bouncy international footballers usually do. One of them had bought a bicycle tyre and inner tube in Vienna. One of our party, a Welsh football enthusiast, asked them for their autographs and this cheered them up a bit.

We were now joined by two Italian gentlemen intent on entering Albania who arrived in a motor car, having driven from Rome.

‘You cannot enter Albania without a visa,’ one of the Yugoslavs said in Italian.

‘But where do we get these visas?’ one of them asked.

‘At Rome!’

‘Va bene, torniamo a Roma,’ the driver said, without hesitation, and turning the car round headed back for Bar, where they had disembarked from the ferry from Italy the previous day. When they had gone, it suddenly occurred to me that the official had not told them that they would not be allowed into Albania unless they were with a group, and I asked him why.

‘Because they did not ask me,’ he said. And he seemed to think it a good joke.

Now we lugged our luggage, the young aiding the aged and infirm, along the sizzling expanse of road which constituted the no-man’s-land between the two countries, looking a bit like survivors of some disaster, to the very border of Albania, where we were halted at a barrier by a savage-looking soldier in shiny green fatigues, armed with a machine pistol. To the right was the inlet in which fast little motor boats were kept ready in the shallows, where orangey-yellow water fuchsia were growing. To the left was the steep hillside and, running along the foot of it, an electric fence with white porcelain insulators supporting the wires, about eight feet high with overhangs, which would have made it impossible to scale even if the current was off. It looked as if it was no longer in use and I wondered if it had been the sort that frizzles you to a cinder or the kind that rings bells, or indeed the type that does both, and whether it actually encircled Albania.

The barrier was surmounted by a sign bearing an imperialistic-looking double-headed black eagle and a red star on a yellow background which announced that this was the Republika Popullore e Shqiperise, Shqiperia being ‘The Land of the Eagles’. Knowing that I would have difficulty in remembering how to spell this later on, I began to write it down in a notebook, but the sentry made such threatening gestures that I desisted.

Here, with us all still standing on the Yugoslav side of the barrier, Nanny, our Tour Leader, handed over a multiple visa, procured from the Albanian consulate in Paris, with photographs of all thirty-four of us attached to it, most of them taken in those smelly little booths that can be found in amusement arcades or on railway stations. It made the visa look like an illustrated catalogue for a chamber of horrors and it took the official, to whom he now presented it, some time to convince himself that what he was looking at were real people, although one would have thought that he must have had plenty of experience of looking at similar documents.

It was during the inspection of these credentials, in the course of which we were called forward to be identified one by one, that he discovered that the numbers printed on our two passports did not tally with those on the multiple visa. This was because our old passports had expired when we applied to join the tour and the new ones had not yet been issued to us when the visa was applied for by the tour company because of a strike by British passport officials. Eventually we were admitted, probably because the coach that had brought us to the Yugoslav frontier had already driven away and we would have been a problem to dispose of.

Now, in the customs house, one of the antechambers to Albania, we were ordered to fill in customs declarations, and a wave of collective panic seized the group when it was discovered that the only two languages in which the questions were posed were French and Albanian.

Possèdez-vous les objets suivants Poste émetteur et récepteur, appareil photographique, magnétophone, téléviseur, refrigerateur, machine à laver et d’autres equipements domestiques, montres, narcotiques, imprimés comme lettres, revue du matérial explosif?

As a result of not knowing what a lot of this meant, normally law-abiding members of the group imported radios, tape recorders, copies of English national newspapers, the New Statesman, Spectator, New Scientist and a pictorial souvenir of the Royal Wedding, although one timid girl, asked by a hopeful official if she had any pornography about her, blushingly handed over a copy of Over 21.

Here, in these otherwise bare rooms, we had our first close-up of Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hoja), founder of the Albanian Communist Party in 1941, First Secretary since 1954 of the Central Committee of the Party, and the Leader, apparently for life (he was born 1908), photographed with survivors of the 1979 earthquake, below a placard with an injunction from him that read:

EVEN IF WE HAVE TO GO WITHOUT BREAD WE ALBANIANS DO NOT VIOLATE PRINCIPLES. WE DO NOT BETRAY MARXISM-LENINISM.

From then on we were confronted everywhere by his smiling, cherubic-mouthed, well-nourished – no sign that he was forgoing the staff of life – slightly epicene image. It was Evelyn Waugh who, while on a wartime mission to Tito, suggested that Tito was a woman and he could with equal propriety, or rather lack of propriety, in both cases belied by their records, have said the same about Hoxha. We saw him on enormous hoardings, sometimes marooned in the middle of fields, usually wearing a silvery-looking suit with matching trilby and carrying a bunch of flowers, like a prodigal son, who has made it successfully into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, returning to visit an aged mother in a hut. Sometimes he was depicted, but usually only in more sophisticated surroundings such as the foyers of tourist hotels, straining to his bosom pampered little girls, of the sort popular with his hero and mentor, Stalin, some of whom were wrapped in equally silvery furs.

‘Shall we be able to see him in Tirana?’ was the first question we asked the Albanian interpreter who would be accompanying us on our tour and who was about thirty-five with streaks of black hair plastered down over a brainy-looking noddle, like a baddie in a Tintin book. He looked at us as if we were a couple of loonies.

The first Albanian I ever met, and the last for some twenty-five years, was Zog, the King of Albania.

It was in Egypt in 1942, and I was spending my leave from the Western Desert in a rather grand house in Alexandria. While I was breakfasting with my hostess, the chef appeared, as he always did at this time of the morning, in order to receive his instructions for the day.

‘There will be twenty to luncheon,’ she said as she did more often than not, at least whenever I was staying in the house, addressing him in French, and the chef inclined his head without batting an eyelid. And to me, ‘I do hope you will come. I am sure the King will enjoy talking to you.’ They then went on to consider the menu in detail.

The King was then forty-nine years old, very tall and very thin and dark with a razor-sharp moustache of the sort I later learned was much affected by Albanians. His Queen, Geraldine Apponyi, a Hungarian countess, was extremely good-looking, if not downright saucy-looking.

The King spoke French with his host and hostess and the various other guests of high rank who were present. From what I could hear he appeared, rather like Edward VIII, to be interested in trivia; but he looked a tough customer. I never spoke to the King or the Queen, being a very junior officer of no consequence. Instead, I got a rocket from a general who was also present for wearing a flannel suit instead of uniform. I told him that my uniform was in a bad state of repair and that it was being mended by an upstairs maid, which impressed him. ‘I don’t have an upstairs maid,’ he said, with unconcealed regret. He also asked me what I was doing and I told him that I wasn’t allowed to tell him as it was supposed to be secret, which was true but didn’t go down very well either. Altogether, it was not a luncheon easily forgotten.