A former “Eastern European” charts Tirana’s makeover for Western travellers—until an untouched bar reveals what Albania may have given up to join the club.
As we enter Bar Tirana, the creaky door slamming behind us, four drunk men stop mid-conversation and stare. Their faces express little, but even that is enough to make us uncomfortable. The first bar we come across in Tirana’s maze of back alleys that actually bears the city’s name is a half-collapsed wooden shack with lace curtains, a random Union Jack, and shelves of half-empty local liquor. We’ve spent the day documenting the city’s aspirational cafés—Brooklyn Café, Bar Zurich, Café de Paris—all of them performing European sophistication for tourists like us. But here, accidentally, we’ve found what remained when the performance stops.
We arrived in Tirana this morning, a shiny new A320 spitting us out onto the tarmac, then took a long walk through the city, on the hunt for antidotes to the city’s makeover—a chance to see what Albania kept in its attic. But first, coffee. When Ryanair and Wizzair set up bases at Tirana Airport in the early 2020s, Albania officially joined the European club. The evidence is everywhere, starting with the cafés.
*****
I grew up in the 1990s in what was then called Eastern Europe, which has since been upgraded to Central Europe.
The town where I spent my teenage years was nestled in the mountains, though they felt more like oversized hills, blanketed in wheat fields and coniferous forests the higher up you went. We spent a lot of time out in nature, partly because we had nothing better to do and partly because we felt we were learning something from it. Not biology or geography, mind you. Looking back, I’d say those lessons were more about solitude, though I wouldn’t dare to get any more specific than that.
Tourists hadn’t discovered the place yet. Every so often, we’d spot a lone hiker on the hills or wandering around the town’s pot-holed streets, looking mildly lost. Occasionally, one of them would miscalculate the bus timetable and end up needing a place to crash for the night. One of us would take them in, and what followed were long nights (and even longer mornings), filled with conversations about what it’s really like to just up and leave everything behind. We weren’t brave enough to do it ourselves yet, but we were learning.
I remember the moment tourism started to take notice of places like our little town in the hills. The solitary hikers started arriving in groups. Buses began coming more frequently and, surprisingly, on time. The trail markers on trees and rocks got repainted. Even the local hotel got a makeover, although in its early days it mostly served as a crash pad for drunk wedding guests. Weddings were a constant occurrence—weekend after weekend. So, opening a hotel seemed like a logical business move, but soon enough, it surpassed everyone’s expectations.
Then, one day, one of those big foreign travel book publishers decided to put out a 600-page guide to the entire country. In the pre-Internet 90s, this was a huge deal, and we all eagerly awaited its arrival at the local bookstore. For the first time, someone from the outside had come to visit, witness, and recommend our little corner of the world. We all knew how important this was and how it might shape the future of the area. Tourism meant money—that much we understood already.
We began to wonder what our town’s selling point would be. After all, we had options: the hills and forests, freshly marked hiking trails, and, well, a watercourse running through the middle of town. Not quite a river, but a bit more than a creek, where city folk spent sunny Sunday afternoons tanning their feet in the cool water. There was a restaurant (though they served more booze than food) and two bars. One was in a smoky cellar, open late, full of blaring rock music and of our grand plans for the future. The other was more laid-back, tucked in the garage of a stand-alone house, with a pool table, darts, a TV, and space for actual conversations. We had a few shops, a rather ugly church, not even a century old, an abandoned train station, and a rusty railway that wound up the hills in picturesque serpentines, though it hadn’t served any practical purpose in years.
When the guidebook finally arrived, we immediately leafed through its 600 pages, hunting for the mention of our town. We held our breath as we found it, ready to hear the prophecy of our future. We read it aloud: “The restaurant in the centre serves as an interesting spot for sociological observations of the locals.”
That was it. Not a word more. We closed the book and looked at each other in silence.
*****
In the years before Albania began its rocky journey toward the Western model of statehood, it was the North Korea of Europe—isolated, starving, and ruled by paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha. After Hoxha’s death in 1985, government buildings turned into office spaces, McDonald’s and KFC’s snuck into the halls of the abandoned totalitarian behemoths, and the suburbs—those sprawling non-places—filled up with shopping malls and parking lots. A new class of people arrived: well-dressed, tanned, heavily perfumed businessmen and bourgeoisie, blindly enjoying the enshittification process.
Those who were seated farther away from the window of opportunity opened coffee houses, perhaps in anticipation of waves of tourists wanting to appreciate the local flavour. “In 2016, Albania surpassed Spain by becoming the country with the most coffee houses per capita in the world,” according to Wikipedia.
Albania. A country I always wanted to visit, if only for a coffee.
*****
The first café we wander into is named after an old communist holiday, though despite its name, it feels oddly posh. It’s an elegant outdoor joint, shaded by crooked old trees whose branches seem to perform some kind of allegorical dance in a very slow motion. The speakers, tied to the trunks with bits of string, play a bizarre mix of smooth jazz and rockabilly classics. I look for a table by the window but it is taken.
Since I left my hometown behind, I’ve sought out the window seat in a cafe during my travels. Mainly because it allows me to watch things unfold-or fail to-with close attention, and as the old guidebook advised, to observe the locals. Another lesson in solitude, and quite an informative one at that, even though not much usually happens.
We watch a group of German tourists next to us, flipping through their guidebooks with thinly veiled discontent. A young waiter brings our coffees and asks us to pay right away—cash only.
The second cafe is located in the industrial district halfway to the hills. It is a small, unassuming spot, with faded plastic leaves hanging as decoration, aggressively red plastic chairs, and a view of a dusty road outside the window. We shift our gaze from the street to the room itself and notice plywood panelling, a TV set on mute playing sports, and random knick-knacks that look like they were pulled from a flea market on a whim. Things stubbornly fail to happen. The barmaid, probably in her forties, avoids making eye contact with us when she takes our order. Instead of coffee, we order beer. Our disappointment grows as hopes dim for an interesting anecdote. We leave without finishing our drinks.
An hour later, we find ourselves at what is supposed to be a flea market. We’ve wasted too much time in the second café and are late now—most stalls have already packed up, leaving behind a single tin shed overflowing with junk. Starving dogs wander around, indifferent too to our presence. The stall owner, an old woman, tries to talk to us in Albanian. Among the clutter, a plush roe deer stares at us as if afraid we’ll take her away from the chaotic beauty that surrounds her. We leave her behind, though the scene reminds us of what we’ve seen throughout Tirana—a city where disorder and necessity have been shaped into something bizarrely artistic.
Tirana was a uniformly grey city during the communist years. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when the painter-turned-mayor Edi Rama initiated a bold plan to repaint the city’s structures in striking colours, that things began to change. Despite some scepticism from the socially conscious citizens, Tirana was transformed into a living piece of modern art—abstract, surreal, even dadaist in places. This new look seemed to inspire new behaviour: people started taking better care of their surroundings and of themselves. Creativity flourished on many levels. Crime rates reportedly dropped. From a distance, it all looked hopeful enough. At least, that’s what the official reports said.
We stroll back to the city centre as night falls. It’s the ideal time to slip behind the bright, polished façades and see what’s on the other side—the part that hasn’t yet been redeveloped or rebranded to mimic another major European city. We step through an unlit gate into the courtyard of an old apartment building and instantly find ourselves in a different world: quieter, greyer, and definitely less tidy. A group of young men in sports gear—engaged in no sport whatsoever—eye us suspiciously. Time slows.
Our senses grow increasingly disoriented. Invisible eyes seem to watch us from behind window curtains; barely audible murmurs make us glance back cautiously. One of us jokes that the ultimate Albanian experience is the anxiety hanging heavily in the air. We order slices of margherita pizza from a vendor in a converted garage, but our English sounds suspicious to the group of delivery guys. To cut the tension, we head to a bar across the street. Bar Tirana.
The bar is empty except for four drunk men who stop mid-sentence to stare at us. One man slowly rises from the table and takes a step toward us with a scowl on his face. I’m thinking this is what you get when you open a door that’s long been shut. I’m ready to bolt just as he smiles at us apologetically and asks what we’d like to drink.
Sliding behind the bar, he pours us drinks in unwashed glasses. We may very well be the first tourists to set foot here, and in the reflection of our presence, the owner seems to realise it too. The other three men have returned to their conversation, their voices low and familiar, the kind of rhythm you only get between people who’ve been drinking in the same place for years. This is one of those places that Wikipedia would call “an easy way to start a business after the fall of a former reality.” The bar hasn’t quite failed, but it hasn’t succeeded either.
I can’t shake the unsettling feeling that we have invaded something deeply personal to the owner, something he wasn’t particularly proud of—at least not now, in front of us. But are we even a fair benchmark? How much can our tourist gaze uncover of a story that was never meant for us?
By keeping this clearly unprofitable business running, isn’t he clinging to a way of life he’d bet everything on? We’re from the world his city aspires to, but he’s chosen to ignore those aspirations. This bar isn’t for tourists—it’s for him and his friends, even if that choice is slowly sinking him. Maybe he’s defending his life, his work, his yet-to-be-realised ambitions. Outside, the world is changing fast, driven by budget travellers searching for Brooklyn Cafés and Café de Paris. Could he ever catch up? Would he want to?
The raki burns the back of my throat. I recall Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, in which he writes about what follows when a traditional culture comes to an end—a process difficult to grasp until it has already occurred. “What is this possibility of things ceasing to happen?” he asks. “If this is a possibility, it is one we all must live with—even when our culture is robust, even if we never have to face its becoming actual. It is a possibility that marks us as human. How should we live with it?”
For a moment I feel complicit in something I’ve only just begun to understand. I step outside for a smoke. Leaning against the window frame, I stare at the signage: Bar Tirana.
*****
To be honest, I don’t know what happened to that restaurant in the town where I spent my teenage years. I don’t know if anyone ever came there to sit and make sociological observations of the locals. And if anyone did, were these observations worth telling? Did anything happen at all? The whole point of sitting at a window is the possibility of looking away if the stories inside become unbearable. I wonder if the staff at that restaurant were aware of what was written in the guidebook about my country. I moved away from the town and never returned. I rarely think of it, except in places like Bar Tirana.
My ambitions were out of sync with the prevailing urge to keep life unchanged there. I wasn’t prepared to come to an agreement with the world just yet; maybe those agreements are possible only after things cease to happen.
The drone of conversation stopped. I finished my drink and paid the owner whose face softened as we got up to go. Outside, delivery motorcycles wove through piles of rubble with circus-like precision. Somewhere behind us, Brooklyn Café was probably filling up with tourists photographing their Aperol Spritzes. As we walked back, the painted exteriors glowed in the streetlights, promising a European future that hadn’t quite arrived. I’d never known which version of Tirana was the real one-or if that question even mattered. What I did know was that I took the window seat while he chose the aisle and that we would both lose something in whatever came next.
