Archive for October, 2009

5) The Pillboxes. Take a bus ride through the Albanian countryside and one thing is guaranteed to draw your attention: the domed bunkers that litter the landscape. A legacy from Enver Hoxha’s reign (he was a little bit scared of outside invasion to say the least), it’s estimated there’s one pillbox for every four Albanians.

via 5 Reasons to Visit Albania |.

Interesting film; featuring a German tourist who buys an Albanian  bunker for himself.

YouTube – Tirana Year Zero.

Just a video i stumbled upon… What is that in the background?

Their purpose was to provide anti-aircraft fire within the Thames Estuary area. Each fort consisted of a group of seven towers with a walkway connecting them all to the central control tower. The fort, when viewed as a whole, comprised one Bofors tower, a control tower, four gun towers and a searchlight tower. They were arranged in a very specific way, with the control tower at the centre, the Bofors and gun towers arranged in a semi-circular fashion around it and the searchlight tower positioned further away, but still linked directly to the control tower via a walkway.

via BLDGBLOG.

“The removal process is very costly. We could not afford such an expense,” Loci told the Associated Press, saying the army had only provided a tank to help the local initiative at Seman.

Not everyone wants to see them go.

 “The bunkers are always good attraction for foreigners.”

When built, the cost of a typical bunker was equivalent to five years of an average Albanian’s salary.

“You can’t get rid of the history and of the hard labor to build them,” Sadushi said.

via Communist-era bunkers cleared at Albanian resort; rest of the country will have a long wait.

“We had no place to live, but we had plenty of bunkers,” an Albanian spoke of the Communist era. There is still one bunker for every four Albanians today, and nobody seems to know what to do with all of them. An arms grant from China was enough to build them, but there does not seem to be enough money to dispose of these destitute reminders of a fallen political regime. So the people just live around them as they always have.

via Bunkers in Albania.

Tony Wheeler’s bad lands – Google Libri.

They also included the mass construction of bunkers, a programme which began in the early 1970s and expanded like an uncontrollable hysteria. Eventually, all except the most remote and mountainous areas of Albania were covered, and the country now looks like a desolate moon bombarded by large concrete mushrooms from outer space.

via Out of Albania: Invasion of the mushroom bunkers – Europe, World – The Independent.

They swarm over the country in their hundreds of thousands – on the roadsides and along the coast, next to schools, in parks and on open countryside: little one-man concrete bunkers, poking up like mushrooms, testimony to a time when Albania – and above all its Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha – felt threatened from all sides, mostly from its southern neighbour, Nato member Greece. These scattered structures, each equipped with an embrasure looking out at the enemy, are the most prominent remnant of over forty years of isolation under the communist dictatorship that eventually fell in 1990.

via Albania: polit-tourism between coves and concrete beach bunkers.

 An avid enthusiast of Stalinist principles, dictator Enver Hoxha ruled Albania from the end of World War II until 1985. The years of dictatorship brought the country to economic and social collapse. Some of the most conspicuous relics of those days include thousands of concrete bunkers on the Albanian coast. The structures emerged at the beginning of the 1970s, when the Albanian dictator severed contacts with all countries except for communist China.

via Warsaw Voice – Bunker Legacy of Dictator.