“There are a total of 173,731 bunkers, and the average cost was 1,000 U.S. dollars.”
As usual, my Tirana city tour guide, 31-year-old history graduate Eri Xhikola, had the statistics at his fingertips.
“That seems awfully precise, has anyone actually counted them?” I asked.
Eri allowed that it was an official statistic, and that no one knew exactly. The Bunk’art 2 museum more cautiously puts the number at “around 175,000.”
We were standing in a park in the upscale residential area of Blloku, where the communist party elite, including leader Enver Hoxha, once lived. Today, it’s a lively area of shops, bars, restaurants, and night clubs. We were looking at a small, shallow concrete bunker, where two soldiers could shelter from bombs and shells and crouch to shoot at the Americans, the Russians, or whoever happened to be invading the socialist paradise.
Bunkers were constructed all over the country. They ranged in size and depth, from simple ones like this to the elaborate nuclear shelter of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It has four corridors, at least 50 rooms, and a heating, electrical and water system. Like the simple one, it was never used because in the communist era no one ever bothered to invade Albania. It now houses the Bunk’art 2 museum depicting the history of Albania’s police force and its notorious secret police, the Sigurimi.
“Who did they think was coming?” I asked.
“They were worried about the Americans, but mostly they feared the Soviet Union,” said Eri. During the Khrushchev era in the 1960s, Albania had broken away to ally with China. Hoxha refused to reimburse Moscow for all the military hardware it had sent since the end of World War II. He feared that the Soviet Union would send in the repo squad.
Near the bunker stands a series of poles and roof beams that once reinforced the tunnel of a copper mine. It was brought to the park from one of the labor camps where the regime sent political prisoners, dissidents, and common criminals to work in appalling conditions.
And, in a symbol of the fall of communism, there’s a section of the Berlin Wall, a present from the newly unified Germany.
“We asked if we could send them some bunkers as a return gift, but they said they already had enough in East Germany,” said Eri. I wasn’t sure if he was joking.
