Tourists impressions

Today we visited the largest of the approximately 170,000 bunkers in Albania (that’s one for every 11 people at the time of completion, most made to hold just one person). Hoxha and team had originally planned to build 207,000, but time caught up with them. This one, at 2,568 square meters on five levels was built into the side of a mountain just outside the city of Tirana between 1975 and 1978. It now houses a great museum called Bunkart and these are just some of our photos...

1 Entering the site

2 The entrance to the bunker

3 A map of the bunker

4 Two of the the series of doors to the bunker

5 Enver Hoxha portrait on the special fiber board wall of his roomy and we’ll appointed quarters in the bunker. 

6 Emergency air recycling system should the power and/or larger bunker air handling system fail

7 One of the Albanian history exhibits that help to explain how this whole thing came about from the run up to the World Wars through to the Communist system’s collapse in 1990

8 The Assembly Room - so much we could say here...

9 Gas Mask - chemical attacks were as much as nuclear

10 Many of the rooms now hold art exhibits. Most with some political/historical point of view. That’s a bust of Hoxha himself caught in the basketball net. Game over.

#albania #tirana #bunkart1 #bunker #museum #atlasobscura #lp #nomads #wanderers #travelisknowledge