Bunker-based hotel, Vlora

Bunker-based hotel, Vlora

At one point in our conversation Martha asks him, “What is being done to help people like you, who have suffered so much?” Dilaveri says, “We hope so much for help from Europe and the United States. Here in Albania there is no work...”

Beyond this attractive hotel, where we ate lunch together, the view of autumn is sad. Some meters from us horses are grazing, set free from their labor.

Some of the remains of communism can be seen at this hotel, whose builder cleverly utilized former bunkers for its foundation. The bunkers, of which 600,000 remain, were Enver Hoxha's paranoid reaction to the imagined threat of Anglo-American imperialists and Russo-Bulgarian revisionists.