It was called the Tyrannical Pyramid. A brutalist museum built in the late 1980s in the center of Albania’s capital in honor of communist dictator Enver Hoxha has now been transformed into a computer training center for young people. According to Reuters, the small Balkan country thus removed the last vestige of a repressive past.
It used to display personal belongings and huge photographs of Hoxha, whose harsh Stalinist rule from 1941 to 1985 cut off Albania from the rest of the world. Although the dictator expanded literacy and health care, he let most people live, he executed thousands of political prisoners, and up to 200,000 people went through his labor camps modeled after the Soviet gulags. she wrote BBC.
At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, Hoxha rejected criticism of Soviet leader Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, which led to a rift with the Soviet Union. In 1968, in protest against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, Tirana left this grouping and tried to get closer to China. She ended up in total isolation.
However, it did not concern the dictator himself. “While ordinary Albanians were starving, Hoxha and his wife enjoyed a supply of Italian salami, French wines, Western cigarettes and used the services of French doctors. According to estimates, they owned several houses, 25 refrigerators, 28 color televisions and 19 telephones,” he stated British newspaper Guardian.
This is also why the Albanians immediately after the fall of the regime in 1991 began to get rid of thousands of concrete bunkers that Hoxha, obsessed with the idea of a NATO or Warsaw Pact attack, built along the coast and the border, as well as his statues. However, the fate of the museum, which housed the leader’s three-meter marble statue, remained unclear for a long time.
In the end, the renowned sixty-four-year-old Dutch architect Winy Maas with the MVRDV studio undertook the revitalization. Now the building can host hundreds of young Albanians who would like to be educated in computer technology and programming. According to the Albanian government, the newly established training center is the result of efforts to bring the Balkan country closer to the European Union.
Tirana pyramid after revitalization. | Photo: Reuters
The original architects, which included Hoxha’s daughter Pranvera, designed a pyramid-shaped building celebrating the deceased leader as an Egyptian pharaoh. They completed the museum in 1988, three years after Hodža’s death and two years before the fall of communism there.
One of the museum’s original curators, Leon Çika, says that even when the building was completed and regimes controlled by the Soviet Union were beginning to collapse throughout Eastern Europe, he had an inkling that it would be the last monument of the old regime.
The walls of the museum, which resemble rays and were preserved during the current reconstruction, were used by Albanian children, among other things, as a slide in the following years, as there were no properly equipped playgrounds in the city at that time.
The renovated circular exterior now forms a regular staircase that visitors can climb to enjoy a panoramic view of Tirana, which has become a modern bustling city over the past three decades.
In the interior, there are blocks piled almost to the ceiling, which will serve as classrooms.
For a long time, Albanians disagreed on how to deal with the building. Considering Hodža’s repressive legacy, some advocated its demolition, while others, on the contrary, wanted to preserve it in its original form as an architectural monument. “We cannot continue to maintain a building where the ghost of a dictator is present,” he said for example, in 2011, the deputy speaker of the parliament, Enkeleid Alibeaj.
After the fall of the regime, the leader’s remains were moved from the pyramid to the cemetery. The building gradually hosted a nightclub, a TV station, and even NATO representatives during the alliance’s 1999 intervention to end the war in neighboring Kosovo.
“It was an architectural monument like no other,” said Ilda Qazimllari, director of investments at Tirana City Hall. “On the other hand, the original idea was a mausoleum to celebrate Hoxha, and that’s why people wanted to erase the only symbol left from communist times,” he adds.
