For decades Albania was officially an atheist country. Not only was religion persecuted but it was outright banned. When we first came to Tirana in 1993 it had become the great religious bazaar, with missionaries of all stripes trying to wedge into society. Different brands of protestant set up storefront churches with different appeals. I remember one church featuring “Christian Clowns” another mission was through promoting choral music. In 1994 missionaries set up the Stephen Center, a Christian Coffee House and restaurant which became the de facto American hangout. Suzi and I spent a lot of time there. It closed just two weeks before we arrived in Triana. We had a lot of conversations at the Stephen Center. One missionary from California said he was a laid back Christian but the others are “More Southern than Baptist.” And as if to prove that one Moravian PhD student did his dissertation “Evangical Missionaries and American Cultural Hegemony” based partly on his interviews and observations at the Stephen Center.
Back in the 1990s we encountered Islamic missionaries, mostly from Turkey but also from Saudi Arabia and even Iran selling their brand of Islam. Different Catholic orders were present. One had a tractor trailer truck that had dioramas of biblical scenes. Tirana had become a great bazaar of faith and showmanship.
Albania has always had a loose relationship with religion. The country was on the faultline between Eastern and Western Christianity, with the North being Catholic and the South Orthodox. When the Ottoman’s took over there were a lot of conversions to Islam. One strain of Sufism, Bekteshi, provided intellectual leadership to Albania in the late 19th and early 20th century. The world Bekteshi headquarters was reestablished in Tirana in 1991 after exile in Detroit during Communism. The Prizren League (The League for the defense of the rights of the Albanian Nation) was founded in 1878 in the town of Prizren, now in Kosovo. It defined much of what it means to be Albanian. The league talked about religious freedom and tolerance. Some interpreted the deliberations as leading to the conclusion that Albanians should be indifferent to religion, meaning that what your neighbor believes is no concern to you. At that time a Catholic patriot wrote, in the poem O moj Shqypni (Oh Albania), that has been associated with the League “The faith of Albanians is Albanianism” (Feja e shqiptarit është shqiptaria). Enver Hoxha, the Communist leader, took that slogan and ran with it when he banned religion.
In our early days in Albania much of our discussion centered around religion. People were curious. We engaged in all sorts of conversation and were asked all sorts of questions. My two favorites were “Who was the greater religious philosopher, Soren Kierkegard or L. Ron Hubbard?” and “Santa Maria, Virgin or whore?” That last question was not meant to be provocative. That was the extent of his English and he wanted to know if I believed in the Virgin Birth. I am a Unitarian and several people wondered how that was different from being Jewish. Speaking of Judaism, Albania had a larger Jewish population after Nazi occupation than before because of Albania’s fierce code of hospitality and a belief that went beyond religious tolerance. Albanians took in fleeing Jews from Solonika and Serbia.
So, on this trip I wanted to see how Religion had developed, at least in its physical manifestations, in Tirana. I have no idea how the presence of these physical structures reflects most people’s religious belief or practice.
The main religious building in Tirana is the Ottoman Et’hem Bey Mosque off Skanderbeg Square. It has been freshened up, an electric sign giving prayer times has been added as well as sunshades outside the mosque built for Friday Prayer overflow.
Another traditional Islamic site is the Turbe of Kapllan Pasha, a tomb that was preserved by the Communists and is now overshadowed my newer buildings, but still intact.
The Turks have built a massive new mosque that completely overshadows the Parliament. The Namazgah Mosque or the Great Mosque of Tirana, styles itself as the largest in the Balkans (but only if you don’t consider European Istanbul to be part of the Balkans.) It is part of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plan to reestablish large mosques in territories that had formally been Ottoman. There was some controversy because it overshadows the Parliament and because it’s design, is what one architectural critic, called McOttoman. It houses not only a mosque but a large underground parking garage, a Hilal restraint, a Turkish Coffee shop and a souvenir shop selling Islamic tchotchkes. It also has a display hall with a Virtual Reality 360o history of Islam. It cost the Turks 35 million Euros. Unlike the Et’hem Bey Mosque women must enter via a separate entrance and are confined to the balcony while men are on the main prayer floor. One Albanian told me that the mosque was a good addition because it caused the closing of several smaller mosques that had radical imams and were used to recruit Islamic fighters for Afghanistan and Syria. (About 150 Albanians signed up for ISIS, according to The Economist.)
The Bekteshi order has built a new world headquarters that we could see from the hop on bus. The bus was supposed to stop there but didn’t. I wanted to visit because when I lived in Albania, I visited the site before the new Tekke was built and learned something of Sufism for the Babba of Tirana. He has since passed but I wanted to pay respects. When the bus stopped further down the line, I asked why we had not stopped at the Bekteshi Tekke. The conductor told me that he asked the people downstairs if anyone wanted to get off and no one spoke up. We were on the upper deck. We didn’t have time to return.
There is a new Greek Orthodox Cathedral, built with money raised by the Orthodox community in Albania and worldwide. The Resurrection of Christ Cathedral was designed by the architectural firm Papadatos Partnership LLP in New York which provided a significant part of the funding for the Church.
And there is a Catholic Cathedral, St. Paul’s, consecrated in 2002. Both it and the new Mosque are along boulevard Zhan d’Ark and I would have passed both on my walk to the Pyramid of Tirana, where the USIS and USAID offices were located, as well as the Voice of America studio where I taught students radio production.
The Pyramid is the final “religious” building. It was built as a memorial to Enver Hoxha, the Communist despot who ruled Albania for more than 40 years. It was designed by his daughter, an architect and was a monument to Hoxha “cult of personality” which was sort of a secular religion. Students I taught were, just a few years earlier, told to repeat the thoughts of Hoxha as their own. Plagiarism was encouraged if you were plagiarizing the leader. That made it difficult for me when my students copied writings from democratic leaders and called it their own. When I arrived this temple to the cult of Enver Hoxha had become the de facto American center. It also housed human rights groups like the Albania Helsinki Committee, where Suzi worked, dedicated to release of political prisoners. I found the irony delightful irony.
