Balkan Journal | Albania | Nov 2023
The Road to the Spaç
If you escape the Spaç, you’ll either turn back or die. That is what I was told before we set off to find the remnants of the notorious forced labour camp in the northern Albanian mountains. The long journey up to the site would soon make that clear. I was with a man called Nick, who I had met in Shkoder a few days prior, he worked as a science teacher in a local high school, and I had spoken to him over a few beers in a small bar I had come across in a residential part of the city. I had asked him about finding abandoned and communist era sites around the city and surrounding area. He had pointed out to me some of the thousands of bunkers that litter Albania that had been built to repel a possible invasion, and whilst interesting, I had seen a million of these already and wanted to find something more substantial to find and write about. This is when he brought up the Spaç. I had read about it in books and articles but assumed that it was too far to reach without a rental car, and even with a car it would need to be a four by four, not a run of the mill Dacia. I asked him if he had been to which he replied yes, but exclaimed how it was a fair few years ago and was not sure of the current state of prison, and if some of the buildings still stood at all. I may have ignited the adventure spark in him with my bombardment of questions about the Spaç as it wasn’t long before he offered to take me. I agreed to cover half the petrol, on the assumption that his wife would let him borrow her Toyota as he doubted his Mercedes could get up the track. The next morning it was a go, we loaded up with fuel, our bags and a couple spare tires and started heading towards Lezhë.
The Spaç (pronounced Spacha) was a forced labour camp in the remote mountains of northern Albania, it was opened in 1968 under the Stalinist Dictator Enver Hoxha in the communist era. It was notorious for being particularly brutal and mainly housed political prisoners and those who went against the regime in the party’s eyes including many intellectuals. The main used of the prisoners was to mine copper and pyrite, and subsequently due to its remote location did not have any wall around it. It remained in operation until the fall of communism in Albania in 1991. Today the prison sits abandoned and the foot of a new Turkish owned mine slightly further up the mountain.
Part of a modern day mine on the road up the mountain
After a couple hours on the road through the mountains to the village of Reps, which would have simply been a dirt track before the 90s we pulled off to the start of the battered dirt track leading up to the prison. I was told by Nick that during time the regime, the trucks that would carry prisoners and supplies from Tirana would have taken about 8-9 hours to reach the site. Disturbingly very few prisoners would ever escape, or even try to. Escapees would turn back shortly after getting out, upon the realisation that they would never make it back to civilization alive, and would be killed off, most likely by the elements or by exhaustion, and that to live and work through dehumanizing conditions and relentless labour would be the only vessel of survival. Many prisoners would have been killed off simply by the poor conditions of the Spaç. There are many alive in Albania today who would have been sent to one of Albania’s gulags who still would remember passing up a dirt track just as we did, but to a horrific reality at the end of the road.
The Toyota, which was more than capable of making it up the track, seemed to take forever, gradually making its way up into the mountains. After passing some Turkish Excavators and Mining equipment and after a series of sharp steep bends in the roads, we saw the rusty sign for the camp, barely hanging onto the poll that it was mounted too. One thing that always surprises me about Albania is the driving. Even in the national parks on tight single lane mountain passes, an Albanian will still overtake you at seventy to eighty kilometers an hour and treat the early two thousands Mercedes. After passing a few of these crazy drivers, likely workers from the new mines, we came closer until we could see the tops of the first towers of the prison first appear from around the bends. It became clear what Nick was telling me about the camp on the drive up, as no fence, or any evidence of there being any perimeter of the prison was present. It was simply a road leading up to the blocks, no different as to how my road leads to my front door. Upon arriving we parked up next to the two blocks, on a widening in the track, and started to look around the area.
Prison staff/guards accommodation block.
The two towers that stood first as you come up to the camp, and the first indication that you are here were where the ‘free’ workers would live in –the guards and the staff, who in a way, were also imprisoned here due to the remoteness of the prison. Many who worked here were soldiers who had no say in where they were posted and almost lived as the prisoners did. The buildings themselves were completely empty and dilapidated. No windows, furniture or anything remained in its walls, they had an unwelcoming and almost hostile look to them as we first saw them, intimidatingly tall blocking out the light as you drove under them. After the engine of the car was turned off and excluding the occasional muffled sound from the current mine, the atmosphere was silent with just the sound of the wind. Most of the rooms in both blocks where either communal rooms or bedrooms with each corridor containing two squat toilets at the end, and a view of the mountain pass from the windows. The tower situated behind the first block had significantly bigger rooms, most likely housing officers or prison officials. Some rooms had a few tiles remaining onto the wall or some wood paneling that had not yet rotted away. At the base of both towers were leftover pieces of wagon and rubbish that had been there for at least twenty years. “The Gypsies cleaned the place out, all pipes, all wood, it is all taken” nick explains. They would have come after the end of the regime and once the camp had been abandoned to salvage anything they could, particularly metals or anything of value.
Toilet and corridor inside the first tower.
Situated next to these blocks is the stone steps up to where the large Statue of Enver Hoxha used to stand. Serving as a reminder of the Totalitarian and cult of personality state Albania was until the early nineties. Towering above the track on the way to the actual prison part of the site, this would have been one of the first things that prisoners would have seen before starting their sentences, many not to return home. Today the statue is gone however the steps remain with a newer stone plaque put there by a local church to commemorate the victims of the camp and the communist regime. Behind the plaque dotted up around the side of the hill were small decaying buildings, most likely used for mining equipment or storage housing. These had since become unreachable since the paths had essentially been buried into the step foliage after the last thirty years. Noticeable bricks and chunks of plaster lay perched above the road along the bank where pieces had fallen.
The plaque where the statue used to stand.
A hundred and so meters up the road was prison itself. Similar to the first two towers the collection of buildings was in a complete state of disrepair, just shells with no windows, doors or furnishings remaining. The first three story building was the administration building, where the officers and prison officials would work, the building that would contain the offices, the armory etc. The ground level was a large room where the windows looked over back down the valley, a bright room with the paint still on the walls in the communist two-tone paint found in many government buildings from the time. Some tiles remained stuck to the floor whilst others had evidently been hacked off likely from salvagers after the camp had been abandoned. The corridor and rooms above were used as offices, and many of the walls were covered in bullet holes from the mid to late nineties during Albania’s lawless years when the armory would have been raided for arms and ammunition. The outside of the building held the most striking remnant of the regime, the façade of the building held three propaganda paintings, almost completely faded now and had been graffitied. The paintings said a party slogan along the lines of “Liberation through work” with the center piece being the picture of a partisan’s face holding a rifle with the wings of the Albanian eagle behind him. Through weathering and sunlight, the paint almost completely gone with only a faint marking of what was there, poetically similar to Albania’s journey to a modern European state leaving its totalitarian past to fade behind it.
The officers' block.
Remnants of Party slogans and propaganda.
Bullet holes in the walls.
Stood next to the officer’s building was the small hut where civilians could, rarely, visit their imprisoned family members. Now barely standing with the interior walls collapsed, they were only permitted to speak for a matter of minutes through a small opening in the wall, with a prison guard present. Family members had to endure the same long journey the prisoners did and could easily take two days, and sexual assault of female visitors by prison guards and officials was not unheard of.
After walking down the steps the camp led onto a courtyard area which housed both the canteen and the medical building. The medical building was destroyed, merely a pile of wood, bricks, and tiles. The canteen still stood with a few wooden tables and chairs still inside. The room was unfurnished with very little light, the walls exposed concrete. Prisoners would eat in shifts, usually very tightly times with very little food, usually broth with bread. A common punishment was to not allow a prisoner food for a certain amount of time.
View from outside the canteen.
The most interesting, harrowing and almost humorous part of the camp was the accommodation blocks. The small, cramped rooms, where bunk beds would have risen to the celling to fit as many men in as possible, where covered in the drawings and writings on the walls from the prisoners. The paint on the wall was deteriorating fast, with some walls falling down, so many of the poems, stories, illustrations and rebellious words and phrases on them are lost to history.
Some prisoners drew religious symbols on the walls, an act of rebellion as religion was outlawed in communist Albania, and was the worlds first official 'Atheist State'.
In almost all the rooms, some prisoners had engraved into the walls their names, where they were from and the length of their sentence, in this case, the man was from the city of Peshkopi and was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months.
Also in rebellion, prisoners would write anti party or ant communist things as well as pro western words and phrases. On this wall one prisoner wrote 'U$A'.
Drawing and writing western brands were another rebellious act.
Many walls were covered in doodles of sports, animals and people.
The accommodation blocks, which had multi stories and walkways on the front of them, were deteriorating fast, the Albanian government had put some support poles and scaffolding on the front of the building a few years prior, but it was not doing much in the way of supporting it long term. The ground in front was littered in bricks and chunks of concrete that had fallen from it. Many of the doorways into the rooms still had the wooden banner over them with more party phrases about labour and socialism. Nick tells me how the rooms would be an oven in the summer and a freezer in the winter, with little in the way of protection from the elements.
Accommodation block.
Party Slogan above room.
As our time visiting the Spaç came to an end, and we walked back along the track towards the car, Nick points to an area on the opposite side of the mountain, down near the bottom. Theres a square, not too large where the trees are smaller and younger, and less densely populated. Within a few seconds of assessing it, it was clear that was the site of a mass grave. Where the bodies of prisoners who died during their time at the Spaç, either through exhaustion, illness, or execution, would be buried. Many have not been exhumed and identified to this day. The conversation takes a turn, and nick tells me that there was a revolt.
The clearing in the forest.
On May 21st, 1973, the prisoners of the Spaç united in an uprising against the guards of the prison. Their demands where freedom, both them from the prison and Albania from communism. They waved the Albanian flag from the roof, but without the yellow communist star above the eagle. The revolt was quickly crushed when police and soldiers surrounded the prison and violently restored order. Four of the men who were accused of orchestrating the uprising were swiftly executed, and 66 others being resentenced, usually an additional 25 years of hard labour. Many of those resentenced would only be released upon the fall of communism.
Passage through to courtyard.
remains of the painting of a soldier.
I’m told how the camp is in far worse condition from when Nick last saw the site 5 years ago, and he doubted most of the structures of the camp will still be there in another 5 years. He wished the Albanian government would make it a national memorial place and invest money to restore some of it, to remember those who were sentenced there, but understand due to the remote location it would be too expensive. Nick makes the remark as we drive away from the prison “We were all prisoners in communism”.
View of the Spaç from the road.