Okay. The people are nice. The country is (purportedly) beautiful. But is it possible to travel in Albania?
People's two biggest fears, if they read newspapers, are poverty and war, and these are unfounded.
Poverty I've already spoken about. The insensitive tourist could miss it entirely, and the rationalizing tourist could convince himself or herself that he or she was doing the best thing he or she could do for their economy--being a tourist. The Albanian economy is in fact not in good shape. Their agriculture is on the edge, not thriving, but not broken down completely. They do have watermelons. But their industry is in utter ruin. Factory managers discovered they could do better selling on the black market any raw materials they received, rather than using them to keep the factories running, so those factories stopped producing the raw material needed by other factories, and soon the shortages spread through the entire economy. Today the average factory is not only shut down, it is gutted. Even the window frames have been stolen.
There were very few beggars outside the two major hotels in Tirana, certainly nothing in comparison with the homeless in the average American city, and outside Tirana there were no beggars at all.
Well, not quite. At the Tirana airport, small packs of boys followed me, shouting, ``Hey Italiano! Mille lire!'' At the fortress of Kruje, where again I was the only tourist, two boys spotted me, and then two more, and then two more, and soon I was leading a flock of them around the ruins. Their conversation was somewhat boring, basically, ``Give me a dollar! Give me a dollar!'' As I would balance my way along broken walls next to steep drops, they would leap in front of me and break my stride. The one time a boy made me fall, it was fortunately not far. But this is not really begging. A friend of mine, now a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina, was a refugee from Lithuania as a boy, in Germany, and he remembers with fondness chasing after American soldiers and pleading for chewing gum. I myself. I had a railroad track behind my house, growing up in South Bend, Indiana, that was unused except when passenger trains brought in fans for Notre Dame football games on autumn Saturday afternoons, and we ran along beside the trains begging for nickels and dimes. I still remember the triumph of getting a half dollar.
The situation of a man I met outside the Hotel Tirana told me a lot about the state of the Albanian economy. He was a mechanical engineer, but now he no longer worked as one. It was much more profitable to hang around the steps of the hotel, selling lapel pins to foreigners and offering to change money. I talked to him for quite a while, while a friend of his, a nice-looking, earnest, intelligent young man stood quietly by, listening intently.
I think they have a future in tourism (especially after I sell my story to newspapers all across the country.) In fact I devised a three-point plan to develop the tourist industry, which unsolicited I imparted to Agron Agolli of Albtourist, even though he told me he had just escorted an international delegation of tourist industry experts around Albania. My plan is this:
So much for Albania's economy. What about war? Will you get shot if you go there? Well, not right now. The biggest risk for Albania lies next door in the Kosovo province of Yugoslavia. It is 90% Albanian, but the Serbs view it as their ancestral homeland. It belongs to Yugoslavia because of accidents of alliance in World War I. Austria-Hungary was on one side, so Serbia was on the other, so Turkey was on the first, so Greece was on the second, so Albania was on the first, and they lost.
Now the Albanians there want to be part of Albania, or at least have their own republic, and they expressed this wish in 1981 in the form of riots. Since then the Serbs have systematically excluded them from any position whose job description includes the carrying of weapons. But as two Albanian engineers, in Italy for a two-week training program, told me in the Rome airport after they spotted me studying my Instant Albanian for Smart People notes, ``These are not people who talk out their problems.'' If war, or rather, when war begins, Albania could well be dragged into it. The pressure to provide more than refugee camps will be great, and Yugoslavia, which has always coveted Albania, is not likely to exercise restraint.
In Albania itself, there is less likelihood of ethnic or religious conflict, or so the people say. Albanian is the only ethnicity. The people I asked denied any possibility of religious conflict, despite the 70% Muslim, 20% Greek Orthodox (mostly in the south), 10% Roman Catholic (mostly in the north) split. They said it is an old saying in Albania that the first religion of Albanians is Albania. In any case, one would think that the Christians are too outnumbered to complain much. And there is no sign of Islamic fundamentalist fanaticism. The Muslims I talked to quite readily admitted that Islam was a relatively recent (1600-1800) Turkish imposition, fostered primarily by tax breaks, and the only reason they were still Muslim was that it was a more reasonable religion than Christianity (as it no doubt is--having fewer religious principles they have fewer absurdities).
Nevertheless, one should never underestimate the power of religion to provide an excuse to kill one's neighbor. And in Albania everybody knows who is what. (I have no idea what the religion is of most of my friends, or whether they have a religion.) Of the three teachers and the driver in the cafe in Shkodra, one of the teachers was a Muslim, and they used their friendship as an example of religious harmony. But everyone knew he was Muslim, and he seemed a bit uncomfortable when he was identified as such. And as the girl in Berat led me through the streets an old woman scolded her, I don't know for what, and after we were past, she told me dismissively, ``Musselman.''