Fascinated by Europe in transition

We enter the country through a border post from the Serbian side and my vacant EU passport is enriched with a stamp. As we drive over the first mountain pass of Albania, the landscape shows itself.

The scenery is novel to me. Not the greenery or the shapes of hills and forest mountains, but the vast number of small concrete bunkers dotted across the countryside. I lean forward in the passenger seat to get a better look around.

My travel guidebook tells me that the small bunkers were built during the decades long leadership of a communist ruler. Heritage of an European history I am not familiar with. Over 700.000 bunkers were built, which means one for every four inhabitants and an average of twenty-four every square kilometer.

Ever since the fall of Communism in Albania in 1990, the bunkers are abandoned. I realize that they have been unoccupied as long as I live. And as I have seen myself develop and change a lot over 24 years, the bunkers must have witnessed a tremendous transformation in their country as well.

I try to imagine how things used to be back in the days. Soldiers on the outlook for the unwanted, peering through the horizontal gap between the concrete, positioned in a dark and subterranean place. Varying views, from poor roads and meadows, to town homes and cemeteries.

Now I witness skeletons of new houses under construction and cultivated land. I see that the preserved bunkers are being reused for a variety of things and hereby integrated in the everyday life of the Albanians. As storage for cattle feed, immured as part of fencing, as canvas for gravity and sometimes they are just vegetated or surrounded by trash.

The Albanians obviously coexist with the concrete landmarks. The country has moved on and the bunkers seem not to be a burden. Instead, they are used as a fundament to build with and they appear as signs for a bright future.

I lean back in my seat and close the travel guide. The first impression makes me very excited about discovering the rest of the transitional country.