18 May 2010 | In Albania, projects to convert some of the 750,000 bunkers built during Enver Hoxha’s totalitarian regime and scattered all over the country into hotels, cottages and bars are underway.

The estimated three quarters of a million mushroom-shaped bunkers, an article by the TreeHugger media outlet noted, now present an apportunity for creative repurposing and reuse.

Some of the remnants have been turned into restaurants, while others are used for making wine, and others yet have become sustainable eco-resorts.

Hoxha, who came to power in late 1944 and ruled Albania for more than 40 years until his death in 1985, led the Balkan nation into isolation, first from the West, and then from the communist bloc in Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union.

His obsession about a potential NATO or Warsaw Pact attack on Albania triggered a large-scale push to defend the country against invasion. Reports ahead of Albania's NATO entry in April of 2009 quoted Maliq Sadushi, a deputy defence minister under Hoxha, as recalling that it took experts two years to come up with the formula for the "ideal bunker".

The first thick-walled, domed structures made of concrete and iron popped up in 1968. In the following eight years, a network of an estimated 750,000 bunkers mushroomed along Albania's sea and land borders and in its interior. According to some, there were more bunkers than cars in the country.



Albania never needed to use them, as Hoxha's paranoid fears never materialised. Communism in the country of over 3.6 million people ended about five years after the dictator's death, but the hundreds of thousands of ugly, and now mostly abandoned and rundown, bunkers still scar the country's landscape, including its beaches.

Now, a project - “Concrete Mushrooms,” initiated as an idea for research by two Albanian graduate students at Politecnico di Milano, aims to bring attention to the bunkers by studying their history and proposing ways in which Albanians can now coexists with and use them, by transforming these icons of a paranoid past into a symbol of a bright future of the landscape of Albania.

The project’s founding principles are: A critical approach to these bunkers as symbols of xenophobia in order to invert their meaning and change then into symbols of hospitality; The preservation of the bunkers in terms of their link to the memory of an important period of the Albanian history; The recognition of the bunkers as a resource instead of as a burden; The promotion of a sustainable eco-touristic sector in Albania.

The initiative also has a documentary in the making for which a preview is currently available:

Read more about Albania on BalkanTravellers.com