Albanian Food

 Albania is a long, thin country.  The cuisine changes as one heads south between the Mediterranean and a backcloth of high mountains, from hearty alpine fare in the north to lighter Greek-tinged dishes near the bottom border.  This is a land of charcoal smoke and fishy fry-ups, of many bakeries and ever turning spits – Albanian food is surprising and unique, and the cooks here take a lot of pride in what they cook.
At a shady outdoor table in Gjirokastra, overlooking stone alleys and whitewashed houses, we tucked into a plate of Kujtimi restaurant’s specialty: bretkosë. That’s frog legs, if you’re curious.  It’s a dish that Albanians are crazy about (much more so than the French).  From the window of a speeding furgon we once saw whole frogs roasting over a spinning fire.  The two times we've ordered them, though, they've come lightly breaded and fried.

 A first conversation about Albanian food, though – the first phrase in their culinary vocabulary, perhaps – would be about lamb and about all the ways one can roast it.  Lambs, often whole, rotate lazily on spits in the mountains, on the plains, on the city sidewalks of Tirana and on the beaches of the Riviera.  Lamb organs are just as common - everything from liver to brains to zorrë e mbushur, which I saw translated on one menu as "stuffed gut."  I had an interesting time eating roast lamb's head in the capital, and have had a hard time avoiding it since.  These chunks of melting fat and succulent meat were grilled for me by a dour man over a spitting fire, seasoned lightly and served simply.

 In Tirana’s markets, beside great bins of olives and strings of figs, one can find all manner of pickled vegetables – sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate.  Peppers and beets are popular, as are whole cabbages.  We couldn’t pass up this patëllxhan turshi, or pickled and stuffed eggplant, which was one of the stranger finds.  The skin was still crisp, the flesh tasted mostly of salt, the juices of the eggplant and cabbage had a heady, almost alcoholic burn.

 In fact, vegetables – fresh as well as pickled – are surprisingly abundant here.  Everywhere along the roads and beside bus stops, men and women sell fresh herbs and salad greens, cucumbers and (under-ripe) spring tomatoes.  Salads are blessedly popular, imaginative and usually huge.  Among the most simple and satisfying is the ubiquitous jeshile, a green kind of dill, lettuce and olive mix.

 Our first Albanian byrek (pronounced “burr-eck”) was from a man at a plywood and corrugated tin stand in Tirana.  He sold us our spinach pie with a huge smile – it was delicious on a chilly morning, full of rough-chopped greens and scallions.
Byrek is the local name for börek, which is a staple food in most ex-Ottoman places from Ankara to Athens to Zagreb, so we’ve seen this flaky-crust and oily filling before.  They can be stuffed with cheese, ground meat or greens – something like a flatter, thinner spanakopita (itself a derivative, but don’t tell the Greeks that).  This woman in the south made wonderfully toothsome versions with a firm crust.

A Gjirokastra specialty, these little balls of egg and rice are cooked in special pans, like shallow muffin tins, and taste wonderfully of mint leaves.  They’re called qifqi (“keef-kee”), and the man who made them for us was exceedingly proud, though his wife really did all the cooking.  On a cool night, served beside fried sardines and excellent local wine (a rarity, sadly), they were a perfect, filling starch.

At a table by the sea in sleepy, offseason Himara, I had this pasta dish in the exact way that Albanians like their spaghetti: nearly dry, with only a little olive oil, parsley and spice to highlight the starch.  There was tuna mixed in too, a nod to the water.  They were out of any of the small fish they might have mixed in.
According to tradition, Albanian cuisine is a mix of Greek and Turkish influences – but in practice, it’s Italy that has lent some of the most important flavors.  Under Italian rule for a time in the twentieth century, and only a short boatride away from Puglia, the country soaked up pasta and risotto, proshutë and domate.  Italian dishes are on almost every menu not strictly "traditional."

My favorite meal in Albania was the first one, at Oda restaurant in rainy Tirana.  We drank local beer followed by raki, dried out and warmed up.  This peculiar, transcendent dish was called harapash, but was described in English as "lamb innards with corn starch."  Luckily, it was more of a polenta with liver and - as the waiter hedged - "maybe some spleen."  The corn was light and buttery, the liver was perfectly cooked and tender, the whole thing was fragrant with herbs.  It was a meal that one would have a hard time making up, something that seems both simple and unlikely.  I looked for the dish again but never found it.

The Museum City of Berat

It is called The City of a Thousand Windows and at night, when the rare and beautiful Ottoman architecture is lit up, you can see why. We arrived on Saturday evening, as locals were promenading and the lights were coming on. Overhead, fireworks began to pop in the air - celebrations of a wedding. It was a veritable light show - the loud, bright burst of present-day dancing above spotlit history. And it was a perfect first impression of Berat.

Berat was one of two cities in Albania to be named a "Museum City" under Enver Hoxha, giving it protection from the Communist urban planning that steam-rolled most of the country's old world charm. There was something about the title that made me think I would find a town behind glass, someplace undeniably picturesque but a little untouchable. I couldn't have been more wrong. In the murky Osum river, deceptively lit blue the night before, a man and his son threw large nets out in the water. They wore matching white tees and bermuda shorts and caught only sticks.

On the historic stone Gorica Bridge, this young boy tried his own luck with a fishing rod. Cars are no longer allowed to drive over the well preserved bridge, but motorcycles weave through the blockades throughout the day. We walk across this each morning, as we're staying in the section of town called Gorica, which is a cluster of steep, ankle-twisting cobblestones walkways and a cluster of Ottoman-style houses that stand out from the pine backdrop like a page in a pop-up book. This morning, we moved aside for a wide SUV and then again for a man pulling a wooden-saddled mule. The roosters next door have been our alarm clock.

It's a city of 60,000 or so people and in about 72 hours, we feel like we've talked to about half of them. That's an exaggeration, but it's impossible to walk down the street and not enter a conversation. The owner of this clothing store wanted to show me the wedding dresses. She has family in Michigan and Florida, she told us. Just a few feet away, a trio of men were loading a spearfishing gun into the trunk of a car. One of the men was "an engineer for the protected houses," and had done a lot of work in Gorica. Today, though, he was just going to the coast for some fishing.

We were told that Berat has a 60% unemployment rate. That's about four times the national average. I can't help but think that tourism would generate jobs in this Museum City like crazy if this were any number of other European countries. While it's true that we've encountered more Brits and Americans here, about a dozen, than we did in the whole of Tirana, such a uniquely beautiful spot would be swarming with foreigners in - say - Czech Republic or Croatia.

But this is Albania - and while Lonely Planet may have named it #1 on its Top Ten Countries to Visit in 2011, they still haven't put out a dedicated book on the country. (We love you LP, but Bradt's got the goods on this one). The three restaurants we've gone to in Berat so far have all had the same Albanian-English menu, separated into grilled items, pastas and pizzas. Frogs legs, prawns, lamb, turkey, veal - they've all regretfully informed us that today there is only beef and pizza. But as is the case throughout the country, there are also vegetables galore. How can you complain with a lunch like this?

Berat's future may be uncertain, the employment has driven most of the young and aspiring out of town, but it's history is long and strong. In the ancient world of Albanian folklore, it's the land of two giants who became mountains. The woman they fought over's tears became the river. More factually proven inhabitants are: Greek, Macedonian, Byzantine, Roman, Slavic and Bulgarian. It was one of the most important cities in the Ottoman Empire between the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1944, the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Committee met here in Berat and Hoxha's party, the Provisional Government of Albania, beginning his 40 year rein as Albanian's leader. Monuments in the new town celebrate this fact and commemorate those who died in the struggle.

But it's the Ottoman houses that have left the most indelible mark on this 4,000 year old city. And they are simply beautiful. Their white wash-ed walls and terra cotta tiled roofs, large windows and vertical piling make them a sight to be seen. Architecture like this isn't preserved so well anywhere else in the world. But the life that springs up in, on, around and under them make Berat even more worth visiting. If this town is a Museum, you can see the reflection of a at least a thousand people in the glass around the display.

Lunching Around Tirana

Parking lots full of cars, tables groaning with meat, mugs of beer (and highballs of raki!), lamb on the spit, trout darting in ponds, postprandial diners almost snoring in their seats... Tirana is a great place to eat, but you can't get any better than what's around the capital. On the weekends, if you want to lunch like the locals, you head out of town. Anyone with the money and the transport makes their way out into the countryside, into strange little worlds of pastoral fancy and gimmicky eateries.
Not far from the city limits, on a stretch of scenic road that leads up into the Kruja foothills, a string of "country" restaurants tempt Tirana's wheeled set. Signs for places like "Ura e Lizes" (Liza's Bridge) and "Iliria" point to wooded retreats where empty swimming pools and grubby plastic tables are arranged in the shade. The place we ate is called "Natyra e Qete," which, unsurprisingly, means "nature and quiet." With grandiose brick towers and a large playground, it might have been better named "theme-park castletown."
The promise these places make is carnivorous, the diners are there for meat - ribs, liver, lamb's head, paving stone steaks, stuffed tripe - with maybe a side of potatoes and a pitcher of red wine. Patrons arrive in their Sunday or Saturday finery, usually in family groups, sometimes as boisterous bunches of men. They smoke and eat and sit for hours, the dim, cavernous halls giving them some sense of nature, no doubt, that they simply can't find in town. Every weekend feels like a special occasion.
At Natyra e Qete, we ate more modestly than most. A table near us was served two enormous trays of beef ribs, which the diners set about dismantling with greasy hands and sharp teeth. Another table received something akin to a stack of steaks, like a small burial mound constructed of meat. Rebecca had frog legs (a pondful, approximately), which arrived battered and fried but still delicious. I had "baked goat," which was very tender and toothsome - as you can see, there was nothing but the kid on the plate.

After the last raki of lunch has been finished, the idea is to drive tipsily up the road towards Elbasani - a twisting and mountainous route with few guardrails and fatal drops. The views are spectacular. Here, it really is the countryside.
In another direction (upwards this time), one can find another slew of weekend eateries. The restaurants on Mount Dajti - which soars, rocky and immense, above Tirana's skyline - are of much the same type as the ones on the Elbasani road, but they have much better views and the added bonus of a cable car ride. Servicing a national park on a high plateau, the lift up really does feel like an escape from Tirana.
At the bottom station of the cable car we were sold tickets and handed a brochure for the gondola company's own restaurant, located in the unsightly cylinder called "Tower." At the top, (after a fifteen minute ascent), we were met by a man selling pony rides - a youngish woman sat unhappily (shrieking, actually) on the rental steed while her friends took pictures. Rows of drivers and vans waited to whisk customers to their woodland tables. These men work for individual establishments, so it's best to know which one you'd like to go to beforehand, as the competition among them can be overwhelming.

Our driver maneuvered carefully enough along the top of a long cliff, where the more scenic restaurants are arranged. The day was fine, but the peacefulness of the park was somewhat offset by the aggressive techno music our young chauffeur played for us.
We ate our Sunday lunch at Gurra e Përrisë, which has a trout farm on the premises but still seems to be geared towards redder flesh. Typically, Tirana diners eat on the late side - we arrived at one, but it wasn't until about three o'clock, when we left, that the restaurant began to fill up. A fire roared beside red draperies and plushly set tables. The waiters wore vests and ties. The tablecloths were heavily starched and cigarette burned.

(A note: I should mention that smoking is actually prohibited in Albanian restaurants, but the law is completely disregarded by everyone over the age of 16.)
We ordered trout, which came admirably cooked and were filleted at our table by two men who concentrated very hard but seemed unused to the work. My broccoli soup was mostly cream, but was actually quite good.

For two large trout, soups, a large salad, grilled vegetables, beer, wine, a free car ride, formal service and terrific views, the price was about thirty-five dollars, with a heftier tip than what's normal in Albania.
We walked back to the gondola, passing men in suits and women in heels, all of us moving slowly in the spring sunshine. In a mostly atheist country it's a kind of ritual, this weekend lunching, playing a part in the social calendar that otherwise might be filled at church or the mosque. The idea is to leave the city, perhaps, for a carefully curated "natural" experience - one that can be enjoyed mostly by sitting down. It's relaxation. It's reveling in the ownership of a car or the technology of a ski lift.

The ride down the mountain is precipitously steep and blissfully quiet. A few thin, high waterfalls cascade down the cliffs nearby, their watery crashing plays wonderfully through the open window. The city is colorful and blocky below.

Up in the Albanian Highlands

We'd been warned there would be snow. When we arrived in Valbonë, we thought for sure that the ground was covered in it. White spread out before us. But as the furgon drove over to the door of our homestay, its tires created a sound more akin to a crescendoing bag of Jiffy Pop than the squeak and crunch of snow. These white stones cover a good deal of Valbonë valley, brought down from the mountains by the river after which it is all named.  In 48 hours, these river stones would find themselves in a familiar place, back beneath the rush of water.  Two days of heavy downpour carved a labyrinth of puddles and streams so large you'd think they were always there.
In fact, we woke up to find that our homestay had earned a protective moat overnight.  It had taken us 11 hours to reach Valbonë, via three furgons and one amazing ferry, and now a rain-river threatened to keep us from exploring it.  The only choice was to throw the biggest stones we could find into some shallow sections in an attempt to create a footbridge.  After too many kerplunked under the surface of the deepening water, we figured we were stuck.  But our host mother came to our rescue with a pair of galoshes. Embarrassingly, I wound up sending one of the boots down the river in a failed attempt to throw them back across to her, and she jumped in to catch it. Our feet were kept dry, but she was now drenched up to the calves. I reddened, she laughed. In Valbonë, leaving your house to find that a body of water now stands in the way of leaving your property is simply comedic.  
These are the mountains of Albania, where isolation is a part of life. Merlin and I joke that nearing two full years of travel, we aren't satisfied unless we've been to the most remote part of each country. In Georgia, that took us to Mestia. In Azerbaijan, extraordinary Xinaliq. Albania's north is full of villages that fit the bill and Valbonë, along with Theth, have become destinations for travelers who like going off(off-off) the beaten track. Summertime brings hikers from around the world and daytrippers from neighboring Kosovo. Teenagers who live in the nearby hub of Bajram Curri most of the year to attend high school - commuting every day isn't really an option - come home. They work as waiters and hiking guides for their family's business - half the houses become "hotel familiars" with restaurants and rooms for rent.
We weren't the first visitors of the year for our host family, but it is still well before their on season.  They are hoping to complete a new floor on their house, with wraparound balcony, before the tourist crowd begins to stream in.  Full all last summer, they are in need of new rooms.  Valbonë in the summer must be a far cry from the sleepy, rain-soaked place we found. Where, for two full hours of walking along the main road, we didn't see a single car.  This has been the poorest and most isolated region in Albania throughout most of its history and while tourism is beginning to help things a little, life remains mostly the same.  There weren't any cars parked alongside houses and for a month every winter, people are still completely confined to their houses because of the snow. Valbonë is a recognized National Park, which keeps it blissfully free from the litter that plagues most of Albania.  It really feels more like a protected stretch of nature than a cohesive village, with no discernible center, minimarket, post, etc.  The big, pink schoolhouse stands alone, aside from a trio of leftover bunkers half submerged into a hill. In a lot of ways, the Bajram Curri-Valbonë furgon acts as the nucleus of the town. Twice a day, the van makes its way across town. Down to Bajram Curri at 7am, back up at 3pm sharp. In the hours between, the driver runs the village's errands, armed with shopping lists and a handful of things that need to be returned or repaired. We were delivered to our host family along with a quarter chicken and tomatoes.
When we could rouse ourselves from the warm comfort of our room, we explored Valbonë under borrowed umbrellas. Unable to take full advantage of the hiking trails, we simply walked. The newly built museum and tourist center is currently empty and we weren't exactly sure what we would stumble across. As wet as it was, most people stayed in. It was just us and the constant sound of rushing water- from the heavy grey clouds above, from the waterfalls that ran down the mountains on all sides, from the impossibly blue Valbona river at our feet. Just when we thought the bell-wearing mare who leaped past and this salamander that sauntered by would be the only life we'd see, a siren call of chimney smoke brought us into a "hotel familiar/restaurant/bar." Inside, a pair of young men were waiting out the rain with a game of cards and a table of eight were enjoying a marathon lunch. Salads, yogurt with spicy pepper mixed in, fried potatoes, soup and a casserole of macaroni and lamb. When there was a lull in the delivery of courses, they passed around a traditional çifteli and each took a turn plucking at and strumming its strings.
Of course, we also had a family to come home to. And the warmth of the fires they built for us. The matriarch, whose galosh I'd sent a'floating, could light a fire with such ease that I swear she was telekinetic. The patriarch installed this wood stove right in our room, making it look downright tiny as he carried it in. He was a statuesque man with a low, smoker's voice that rattled and boomed. His broad, handsome face was sectioned off in three equal parts like an unfolded letter by one long, thick eyebrow and a long, thick mustache. He reminded me of the heroes' busts set up all around Tirana.

In front of the house sat these picturesque remains of the house he grew up in. With its doorway framing the gorgeous Dinaric Alps it seemed to smile over the ever-growing new home like the portrait of an ancestor hung above a mantle. In the barn next to it, we were shown the goats, who tumbled out of their holding pen, climbing on top of each other to exit like it was the L train at rush hour. Usually, they were up on the steep hill behind their house with the young son of the household. He and his mom screamed conversations we couldn't understand, in parent-child tones that sounded all too familiar. Some things are the same the world over.

The Beautiful Lake Komani Ferry

On a grey, cold early morning in Tirana, we boarded a minibus headed north for Lake Komani. A man got on a few minutes later with three sacks of corn and a shotgun. Hours later, in the tiny cabin of the Dragoba, he took the gun out of its case and began passing it around. His friends and neighbors admired it and someone told a joke. Outside, high cliffs passed by in the mist. This was one of the strangest and most beautiful boat rides one can imagine.
There are two ferries that ply the long, sinuous waters of Lake Komani. The more commonly-run boat is a conventional, small car ferry. The Dragoba, which we took, is an old bus with a hull welded around it. The seats were threadbare, the doors clanged open unexpectedly. A deep, slow, diesel note grumbled from the engine. Two young men were in charge - they looked as though they might be brothers. The captain piloted the boat quietly, surrounded by a chatty group of friends. The first mate collected money and made people laugh – he wore red pants, a fuchsia shirt and pink sweater. Both were lithe and tall, with ready smiles and the friendly nature of Albanian mountain men.

Lake Komani is a dammed lake, running some forty kilometers through the heart of the Dinaric alps. It’s not the easiest way to get to the northern towns, but is definitely the most scenic and the best route that doesn’t lead through Kosovo.

Our “furgon” (minibus, marshrutka) took us up to the top of the dam, some hour away from the nearest town, and dropped us off at the south-western landing. Here - on a patch of cement at the end of a tunnel, surrounded on all sides by cliff and water – there was barely enough room for a few vehicles, a bar, some waiting people and two forlorn cows. The buses were unloaded (our furgon, aside from the corn and firearm, had carried bags of fertilizer, some hardware supplies and sacks that looked to contain cured meat) and men stood smoking. The lake was vividly green.

When the ferry came, it didn’t seem that it could possibly be big enough for us all, but it turns out it was only about two-thirds full. Bags, boxes and sacks were piled against the gunwales (and the cows were left on land) Everyone aboard knew everyone else, they were all neighbors. One old woman held court in the middle of the rows of seats. Wearing a white kerchief over her hair, she spent time talking and laughing with all the young people on board; they took turns visiting with her, receiving kisses on the cheek and pats on the head.
As desolate as the lake seems, its shores are actually inhabited by a few hardy families. Clinging to the cliff-like sides of the mountains are tiny farms, not much more than hovels with a few square feet of plowed earth and a handful of goats. These people, almost totally cut off from the world around them, rely on boats to get anywhere and on the ferry to bring them any supplies or mail. The passengers aboard the Dragoba were mostly going home – we made a lot of stops at tiny landings, not much more than a few rocks, so that people could jump ashore or collect packages. One woman was met at the bottom of a waterfall by her son (who was about five or six). Together they scampered up a trail that looked impossibly steep – the two of them moved like mountain goats, jumping from foothold to foothold. They must have lived quite high up, we couldn’t see where their house was.
The forty kilometers take about three hours to navigate. The ship goes slowly, the way is twisting and narrow. Mountains like these offer little. They’re not more than walls. A way through was made by the river, and all the dam has done is widen this path a little. We moved as though down a hallway, taking turns when they came. The vistas were ever-changing and tightly focused. Shore was never further than a few hundred yards on either side. The others on board had seen it before and barely looked out the window.

A few times, some fishing boat or other would pull up alongside. One young man motored alongside us for about half an hour, communicating with the pilot and his brother with hand signals. Before he turned his boat off into a cove, the first mate tossed him an energy drink from their cooler.

These two men raced to a small landing so that they could get on board. After tying their little aluminum craft to a bush, they lifted the outboard motor onto deck and swung up after it. Our pink-clad crewmember greeted them with hugs and questions. They shared a lunch together in the back row of bus-seats.

By the time we got to the end, the sky had lightened a little. It had rained for some time on the trip, but it had cleared again. The remaining passengers took their things from the deck and said their goodbyes. It was a perfect voyage, the kind of traveling that makes you forget about the destination, casting the time between place as the leading experience. We got off gladly but would have taken the trip again if given the chance – when we left the north the boat wasn’t running. It had rained too much, the water was too high.

A woman we met in Tirana, Zhujeta, had told us that there were once two boats, but that one of them had “sanked.” Luckily, it seems that both are operational and floating.

The Bright Spots

Last night, we had a date with Malvin, a twenty-one year old biotechnology student who waits tables on the weekend. That's how we met him, on our first night in town. He invited us out for some sightseeing and drinks. "This is my favorite place," he said of Sky Club, a revolving bar atop a skyscraper, from where this picture was taken. The rain had stopped halfway through our whirlwind tour of the city's most important buildings and lightning slashed across the clear, cobalt sky as we discussed everything we'd seen over drinks. "Nothing is built by us," Malvin explained with regret and a hint of anger. "The Russians built this, the Italians built that." When he pointed at a whimsical multi-level structure in Youth Park which houses bowling, billiards, a cafe and a casino, he shook his head with a smile he said, "the Chinese!"
He hadn't taken us to the cluster of Albanian-built structures in Skanderbeg Square (above, Skanderbeg on his horse, the miraculously surviving 18th century Et'hem Bey mosque and the historic clock tower). So, we asked about its newest addition, looming large from behind and visible from most parts of the cities. "That is Albanian," he conceded. "It will be the tallest building in Tirana," he said with a contented smile, then added - with his excellent storyteller's pacing - "in 20-25 years, maybe." The builders have run out of money. I wanted to tell him that the museums and government buildings and construction projects are not the parts of Tirana that a visitor would go home remembering - something that I believe to be true. But he was speaking to something deeper about his city and mentioning the tourist impression felt trivial and beside the point.The fact remains that it took an Albanian's stroke of genius (and about a million strokes of the brush) to give Tirana its signature look. In 2000, Mayor Edi Rama - a former painter and Minister of Culture - decided to spruce things up a bit and commissioned bright, patterned paint jobs on many of the communist-era apartment blocks. Sometimes abstract, sometimes geometric, art covers the Painted Buildings of Tirana.
The insides weren't renovated and Rama's critics argued that superficial changes weren't what was most important. But it's pretty amazing what a fresh coat of paint will do. Rama remained mayor for three terms and is now the leader of the Socialist Party of Albania, of which Malvin is a card carrying member. A red business card was removed from his wallet and shown proudly to us, his name written on the back.
I know that its all just a facade - literally - but the bold colors struck me as such a bold decision. Anti-conformity, anti-uniformity, anti-dreariness. Anti-ugliness! For a country that was Communist for 47 years. That period of its life saw the demolition of almost every beautiful historic building in Tirana, the razing of religious buildings and re design of Skanderberg Square. Obviously, the statues of Stalin et. al came down with Communism's fall, but those big, concrete apartment blocks still got the message across. Imagine how terrible this view over Tirana would look without the color? What a blight the buildings would be against such a spectacular natural backdrop.
This is our favorite building, decorated with 'hanging laundry,' made more awesome by the actual laundry hanging around.
Sure, there are a number of people that felt the new look was its own eyesore. Many complained that it made the city look like a circus. Recognizing that these buildings have been fading in the sunlight for a decade or so and are still pretty darn bright, I can see their point. But I keep thinking about what Malvin said and thinking about Rama the artist-mayor signing Albania's name on the skyline canvas in stripes and squiggles and diamonds.
Other Albanian touches around the city include busts of modern-day heroes including this man (whose hair alone is worthy of tribute) and Mother Theresa, possibly the most famous Albanian of all. The man-made lake has seen better days, but the parks are leafy and beautiful. These things may not be the most 'important' landmarks, but they are certainly the most intriguing.
Then, there's the Pyramid. Malvin had us guess what we thought the monument was built for and we mumbled some answer or another. "It is like the other Pyramids. It is for a tomb." The Pyramid was built by former Prime Minister Enver Hoxha, lovingly referred to as "our dictator." "I was not alive when he died in 1985," our winsome new friend said solemnly, "but my parents said it was like the country had no breath. Like there was no sun." Hoxha was interred in the Pyramid for only a short while and then moved elsewhere, Malvin explained. "They will tear it down next year."