Three days in Tirana: the grey city that painted itself

Start in the middle. Skanderbeg Square was a roundabout until 2017, when it was turned into a vast paved plaza laid with stone from every region of the country and planted around the edges with trees. The statue is of the fifteenth century warlord who held the Ottomans off for twenty five years and remains the national hero by a distance; behind him are the ministries the Italians built in the 1930s, ochre and arcaded.

On the northeast corner is the mosque, which is the oldest thing in the middle of the city. It was finished in 1821 after nearly three decades of work, closed under communism when religion was banned outright in 1967, and reopened in 1991 when ten thousand people simply walked in without permission. Inside, the frescoes are painted with trees, waterfalls and bridges, which is unusual to the point of being unique in an Ottoman mosque. It reopened in 2021 after a long restoration, and it is free.

Next to it stands the clock tower of the 1820s, thirty five metres of it, which you can climb up a spiral staircase for a small fee and a view over the square that shows how much of this city is under construction at any moment.

Then walk south past the ministries into Blloku, four streets that were sealed off and guarded until 1991 so that Enver Hoxha and the party leadership could live undisturbed. His villa is still there, unremarkable and closed. Everything around it is now bars, burger places and boutiques, and it is where the city eats and drinks.

This is the day that explains the country.

The House of Leaves is a handsome 1930s villa a minute from the square that opened as Albania's first maternity hospital and was converted within a few years into the headquarters of the secret police's surveillance division. It is now a museum, left largely as it was: bugging equipment, microphones sewn into furniture, files, photographs of informers, and the numbers, which are the part that stays with you, because in a country of under three million people the Sigurimi is estimated to have run one informer for every dozen or so adults.

In the afternoon go east to the bunker. Hoxha had a five storey shelter dug into a hillside on the edge of the city for himself and the leadership, over a hundred rooms of it, sealed behind blast doors and never used. It opened as a museum in 2014, and you walk in through the tunnel and out through his private suite, past rooms dealing with the Italian occupation, the partisans and the long paranoid decades that followed.

The cable car station is a short hop from the bunker, so finish up the mountain. Fifteen minutes of Austrian engineering lifts you out of the heat to a plateau near the top of Dajti, where there is pine forest, a long view over the plain to the sea, and a row of restaurants doing spit-roast lamb. Sunset from up there is the best hour of the day in Tirana, and the temperature is ten degrees kinder than in the city.

Walk down the boulevard to the pyramid. It was built in 1987 as a museum to Enver Hoxha, designed by his daughter and her husband, and it is the strangest building in the Balkans: a low concrete star that children climbed and slid down through the 1990s while the country argued about whether to knock it down. In 2023 it reopened, rebuilt with staircases up the outside and studios and classrooms inside, as a technology centre for young people. Climb it. The view is fine and the fact of it is better.

Then back to the square for the national museum, which is behind the mosaic on the front of the building, a socialist realist panorama of Albanians marching forward through history with rifles. Inside, the collection runs from Illyrian bronzes and Roman mosaics through the Middle Ages to a hall on the communist period and the persecution of the church. Labelling is patchy and the lighting is worse, and it is still the best single explanation of the country you will find.

Coffee afterwards, at a pavement table, unhurried. You will have got the hang of that by now.