Tirana, Albania

Tirana has served of the capital of Albania since 1920 and is the nation's political and economic center. Prior to the 1992 collapse of Albania's Communist regime, Tirana was a drab, impoverished city. Within the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries, however, a newly energized and cosmopolitan Tirana emerged. Economic and democratic reforms, coupled with an ambitious urban reconstruction plan, transformed Tirana from a downtrodden city into one of Europe's fastest-developing urban centers.

Landscape

Tirana is located along the Ishm (Tiranë) River in central Albania, within the fertile Plain of Tirana. It is just under twenty miles from the Adriatic coast. The city radiates out from the centrally located Skanderbeg Square. City officials have implemented strict zoning regulations in an effort to halt unauthorized construction and to ensure the orderly development of Tirana's growing suburbs. The Tirana cityscape features an incongruous blend of Communist-era architecture, Italian colonial accents, and ultra-modern office towers.

The capital's urban renewal campaign has also resulted in the demolition of many unsafe and unsightly structures hastily built by migrant squatters who descended on the capital after the 1992 collapse of Communism. Keenly aware that foreign investment, tourism, and civic order require an aesthetically pleasing city in which to thrive, mayor Edi Rama (served 2000–11) embarked on an ambitious beautification scheme. His campaign led to the planting of thousands of trees as well as the repainting of once drab downtown buildings in flamboyant colors and patterns.

Tirana features a temperate Mediterranean climate. The average daytime temperature during the winter is around 7 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit), while its summertime counterpart averages around 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit).

People

With around 520,000 people (2023 estimate), Tirana is Albania's most populous city. It experienced some of the fastest population growth of any European city in the 1990s and the first decades of the twentieth century. Within ten years of the fall of Albania's Communist regime, Tirana's population had doubled; the exodus of many of its former inhabitants was offset by a crush of economic refugees from other parts of Albania. With average salaries in Tirana twice as high as those typically found in rural areas, the capital's explosive growth showed few signs of slowing, but by 2014, had settled at an annual growth rate of about 0.3 percent.

The majority of Tirana's inhabitants are ethnic Albanians; Greeks, Roma, Serbs, and Bulgarians make up small minorities. A majority of the capital's residents are Muslim. The remaining inhabitants are primarily Albanian Orthodox or Roman Catholic, though there is also a substantial atheist population, partly the legacy of Albania's status under Communism as the world's first atheist state.

Economy

Tirana's economy drives the Albanian national economy. The capital's manufacturing sector turns out products such as chemicals, concrete, asphalt, lumber, metal goods, textiles, clothing, footwear, tobacco products, processed foods, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and farming equipment. Foreign investment has spurred a considerable expansion of Tirana's industrial base. Albania's telecommunications and financial industries are also largely centered in Tirana, and the city serves as a key entry point for tourists thanks to its international airport.

Not all of the capital's citizens shared in Tirana's post-communist boom, however. Albania remains a society in which much of the nation's wealth remains in the hands of a relatively small percentage of the population. Many of the rural migrants who move to Tirana in search of jobs end up living in squalid shantytowns on the capital's edges.

Tirana's economic expansion has also been slowed by the pervasiveness of organized crime and government and police corruption. Despite crackdowns, the continuing prevalence of ill-gotten money in Tirana's economy long put a brake on the capital's drive to realize its full economic potential. It also contributed to simmering social tensions between Tirana's underclass majority and the capital's elite social tier.

Landmarks

Many of Tirana's landmarks are concentrated in and around historic Skanderbeg (Skënderberg) Square. The square suffered severe damage during World War II when heavy fighting led to the destruction of most of its historic buildings, including the city's first mosque, built by the city's founder. A cluster of imposing government buildings that date to the 1930s, when Tirana was under the domination of Benito Mussolini's Italian Fascist regime, dominate one side of the square. Directly behind this complex sits the former headquarters of the Sigurimi, Albania's notorious Communist-era secret police.

The opposite side of the square is taken up by the National History Museum, which documents Albanian history from prehistoric times through the communist era. Special exhibits are dedicated to the thousands imprisoned, tortured, and killed during the reign of Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania with an iron fist from 1944 until his death in 1985. An enormous, gold-leaf-encrusted statue of Hoxha that once adorned the front of the museum was removed in 1991 as the dictator's cult of personality began to crumble. Skanderbeg Square underwent a major redesign in 2016–17, with the project winning the First European Prize for Urban Public Space 2018.

Other key Tirana museums include the Tirana Archeological Museum, which contains artifacts ranging from prehistoric times through the early Middle Ages and the Museum of Natural Sciences, which focuses on the geology, mineralogy, and flora and fauna of the greater Tirana area. The National Art Gallery includes works of Albanian and European artists from the thirteenth century through the present.

Occupying a third side of Skënderberg Square is the Et'hem Bey Mosque, one of the few houses of worship that survived Hoxha's 1967 cultural purge. Built beginning in 1789 but not completed until 1821, the elaborately painted mosque was shuttered until 1991.

Two other religious landmarks in the city are the Catholic Church of Saint Marie and the Orthodox Church of the Holy Evangelist. Saint Marie's, an 1865 gift of the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef, was officially closed by Albania's government in 1967 as part of the nationwide ban on religion and subsequently turned into a movie theater. It reopened as a church in 1990. The Orthodox Church of the Holy Evangelist, built in 1964, was also forced to close in 1967, and was converted into a sports club facility until its reopening as a house of worship in 1990.

Tirana has also seen the conversion of other key buildings to new uses, most notably in the case of the International Center of Culture, commonly known as "the Pyramid." The structure was designed by a group of architects under the direction of Enver Hoxha's daughter, and constructed in 1988 at ostentatious expense, despite the widespread poverty afflicting Albanian society. The Pyramid originally served as the Enver Hoxha Museum and memorial. After Hoxha's regime finally crumbled, a part of the memorial was reincarnated as a disco and for other uses. However, it soon fell into disuse and disrepair and became a haven for drug users and homeless people. In the early 2020s a rehabilitation project repaired and repurposed the pyramid. It opened in late 2023 as a multispace venue for art, education, and other uses.

Other notable Tirana landmarks include the 35 meter (115 foot) Clock Tower—a national monument dating back to 1822—and the ruins of a castle built by the sixth-century Byzantine emperor Justinian I. The Tirana Mosaic, considered the oldest object in Tirana, is thought to have been part of the original floor of a third-century Roman villa.

History

The area that is Tirana is thought to have been inhabited since prehistory, as suggested by archaeological evidence. The modern city of Tirana traces its origins to 1614. In that year Suleiman Pasha Mulleti, a local feudal lord, initiated the construction of a mosque, a public bath, and a bakery in the area of what would become Tirana's center.

Tirana remained a settlement of modest size, population, and importance until the eighteenth century, when it began to develop into a trading center that specialized in textiles, ceramics, ironwares, and gold and silver crafts. Even so, Tirana displayed few signs of modernization until its selection as Albania's national capital in 1920. The city's center, together with most of its key avenues and buildings, were planned by Italian architects during the early 1930s, when Tirana was run by a puppet government propped up by Mussolini's Italian Fascist regime.

Italian troops occupied Albania in 1939, including Tirana, spurring Enver Hoxha's founding of the Albanian Communist party. Hoxha and his followers turned Tirana into their main base of resistance to the Italian Fascist and German Nazi alliance. Communist rebels liberated the capital from Axis control in the 1944 Battle of Tirana that reduced much of the city to ruins and set the stage for five decades of Communist rule.

During Hoxha's long, harsh reign, Tirana grew rapidly in size and population and also developed into Albania's chief industrial center. However, hobbled by Hoxha's policies of extreme isolationism, Tirana remained one of Europe's least developed urban centers. Thanks to Hoxha's policy of restricting car ownership to Communist party officials, the use of horse-drawn carts and bicycles persisted through the early 1990s.

The 1992 collapse of Albania's Communist government ushered in a new era in Tirana's development. The country's new rulers had barely begun to address the problems of the capital's fragile new free-market economy, the city's lack of modern infrastructure, and the mass exodus of many of Tirana's best-educated citizens when an economic catastrophe, precipitated by investment fraud on a national scale, plunged Tirana into anarchy in 1997. Thousands more of Tirana's inhabitants fled to Italy and other neighboring European nations.

Dedicated programs of democratic and economic reforms have restored a degree of stability to Tirana. The new investor confidence in the city's future is reflected in Tirana's ongoing construction boom and growing tourism industry.

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