Nick Gegprifti lives in Shkoder, a city in northern Albania. He works as a science teacher in a local secondary school. I met Nick in a bar not far from his house and ended up trekking to an abandoned communist forced labour camp in the mountains with him a few days later. He had lived in Shkoder his whole life and lived with his wife and three children. Nick tells me he has a great memory; we begin to talk about Albania’s dark totalitarian past under the dictator Enver Hoxha. He remembers much from communism, and the crazy, lawless, exciting, and violent time that followed its collapse.

​

“I was only a child” he begins as we talk about the regime, “But what I remember was not bad”. His earliest memories were that of school, primary age no more than 3 or 4. He remembers singing songs about Enver Hoxha, about Albania and various other socialist inspired songs to do with industry and harvest. “The party get to you at a young age, all the children love them, and love Enver Hoxha.” Nick also tells me about the magazines he used to read, and how most afternoons he would spend after school with his mother, usually playing or helping with something in the house. “Looking back on how the world was then, it was a peaceful time, family meant a lot, it was different for my parents as they had to worry about them [the regime]”. As he grew older into a teenager, he grew interested in the way things worked in the world and lead him to grow  an interest in physics and biology. Nick expresses how good education was in communism, despite the ‘communist stuff everybody had to do’ as he puts it, meaning the propaganda, Schooling was of a far better quality of that in Albania today. “Teachers had no worry when it came to money, everything was covered by them [the state], but now teachers get very bad pay, and children are not happy to be here, I can tell you this for a fact. They just want to be rich”. Every part of education was free under communism including university.

​

One day that Nick remembers clearly was the day Enver Hoxha died, he was still in primary school when the news was announced that he had passed. He explains how grown men were lying on the street crying when it was first announced, “the world just stopped”. Many children, just like him, felt immense sadness as ‘The loving father of Albania’ had just died. Nick draws similarities of when Kim Jong II died in 2011 and the cult of personality around him. “Looking back now it would seem stupid for everybody to cry in the street, but back then it was everything”.

​

When I ask Nick of what he thinks of Enver Hoxha himself, he tells me he has “a split mind”. As he was a child with only good memories, he doesn’t want to say something bad that he doesn’t believe. He compares him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Un  but tells me how  Hoxha was more benevolent to the Albanian people than they were to their people, and how he thinks Hoxha did care for Albania, but goes on to criticise the fact Albania was essentially kept as an ‘Isolated prison from the world’. He adds however “Enver did not ever try to take, Saddam, Putin, even USA, they all want to take oil, land, whatever, but not Hoxha. He never wanted nuclear [weapons]”.

​

The years that followed the collapse of communism were initially fairly peaceful, they were uncertain times Nick tells me, but people were generally hopeful, and excited with their new freedoms and the elections that happened in 1991. Another day he will always remember was the first time he left Albania to go to Montenegro. At the time in 1992, Montenegro was still part of Yugoslavia. Slovenia and Croatia had recently declared independence. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, it was an alien world, so modern”. It made Nick realise how far behind Albania was and what the isolation had done to the country. “There were food and cars everywhere, people had new things, western things, we had no idea this existed”. Yugoslavia was a fairly free nation that traded and had cordial relations with the west, in turn it had the highest quality of living in the East Block. “We were told Albania is paradise, that the rest of the world is an awful hell, we realise everything we thought is a lie”. Nick even expresses how going past the Albania Yugoslavia border was ‘unreal’ as they grow up knowing if you try to go there you will be arrested or shot dead. When they were children, they used to listen to Italian radio sometimes, if they could catch a signal, and talk about what the rest of the world might be like.

​

One thing that Nick soon came to realise after communism went was how corrupt people could become. During my time with Nick, he complained several times about the police in Albania, and about having to constantly pay them off for ‘traffic offences’ such as speeding, even if he hadn’t sped. “The police today are not helpful, they are out to get you, everywhere you see police you know they want something”. Amusingly he tells me how good the Montenegrin police are as they accept a 10-20 Euro bribe as compared to the Albanian Police who expect a 50-100 Euro bribe. “In communism you could trust the police, they were there to help, they did not care for money”. He laughs as he goes on to tell how there were only two cars in Shkoder when he was young, one was a police car and one was the chauffeur of a high-ranking communist official, “now I own two cars myself, and so does my neighbour, and his neighbour”.

​

Nick’s world changed along with the rest of Albania in 1997. Various pyramid investment schemes that the government had urged people to invest virtually all their money in collapsed, devastating the Albanian economy, and leaving most people with nothing. Angry protests that year quickly descended into violence, with many Albanian people across the country resorting to violence against the police and military. The catalyst for most of the violence came when the ‘depots were opened’ as Nick puts it. In south Albania, military depots full of firearms, ammunition and military equipment were looted leading to a state of banditry and lawlessness. In response, the government opened the northern depots as a means of defence from the south. “Almost overnight everybody in Albania had a gun, everybody had Kalashnikovs, handguns, ammunition, grenades and whatever else you wanted.” Nick remembers his cousin, who was a few years older than him, come knocking one evening with box after box of ammunition along with Chinese AK-47 style rifles and various other bits. A wave of violence engulfed Albania, “Everyday you could hear gunshots in the street, it became normal”. Even when Nick met Esma, now his wife, in Shkoder, he remembers picking her up with the rifle stuffed between the seat and the door of his car and a few magazines of ammunition in the back. “This became normal, even in the years that followed 1997, not even she thought anything of it”. Criminal gangs and mafia families soon gained vast amounts of power, including in Shkoder, now that they were armed and had very little in the way of resistance. In August of 1997, the UN sentaround 7000 troops to stabilise the country, and for the most part it worked, bringing some order to the chaos, but guns remained in everybody’s possession and crime was still rife.

 

“The Mafia have replaced the communists now” Nick explains “before, the authority was the communists and the party, now it is the Mafia, even to this day”. He tells me how each city or area has a family that runs it, usually they have strong ties with the local government and sometimes one family is the local government itself. “I know people who want to build their new house, open a shop or demolish something, they have to ask the mafia.” It’s the mafia who really control Albania I’m told. When asked about the new government, and about Edi Rama the current president, he responds with “Rama is good on the outside [foreign relations] he will get us to united Europe [EU membership] but in Albania on the inside, there is a lot that needs to be fixed.” Many of the guns that were looted back in the 90s are still in circulation to this day, and Albanian Mafias and crime groups have significantly grown, becoming a worldwide syndicate. “I don’t know what the solution to this would be, not even the president does, mafia are too deep in Albania to get rid of”.

​

Nick reciprocates the narrative that many Albanians share, “Things will be very good when we are in united Europe [EU]”. And while Albania has been given candidate status to join the European Union in 2014, Nick believes there are many things to be done to get to the point they can join, such as remove corruption and the mafia. He does say how he enjoys the everyday safety of Albania, “Nobody will take my phone, the streets these days are very safe”. The conversation turns back to Communism and what he thinks of Albania’s Totalitarian past to this day. “I think there are some things we should have kept from communism that were good, but they were simpler times, we live in a connected world now, and I am glad we are not in isolation anymore”. The conversation turns again “I don’t understand why so many young people want to leave Albania though, we have been poor yes but if everybody stays then we will become like the rest of Europe. They all like to go to London” Nick explains, “Even in my school, sometimes after summer holidays, some children don’t come back, because their family has moved to somewhere else in Europe”. He thinks this is one factor keeping Albania back from achieving EU membership. “We all need to work together, and Albania is also a very beautiful country, I don’t get why you want to live in a busy expensive country”.

​

As Nick’s story comes to an end, he tells me what he thinks about the stigma about Albanians in modern Europe “Albania went from being North Korea in Europe, no external life and only the same routine and the party, to being lawless and crazy in a few years, sometimes people need to remember this about Albania - we are good people”.