Bunkers in Albania
176 comments
·January 16, 2025Spagbol
frereubu
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a great read on that subject. (It's very long, but the abridged versions are fine as long as you get a good translation). Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny is also great - a biography from a series of post-war interviews with the commandant at Treblinka concentration camp, who wasn't any evil genius, just someone who didn't have any particularly strong moral feelings and went with the zeitgeist. The Lives Of Others is a great film about the Stasi in East Germany too.
Akasazh
Into that darkness is pretty grim, to be honest. Great read but gut wrenching
frereubu
Totally grim, but it put to bed any queries in my mind of "how could anyone possibly end up doing that?" It was really clear how easily unremarkable people just go with the flow until they find themselves doing horrific things without batting an eyelid.
Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust is really interesting (although pretty heavy going - I didn't finish it) on how bureacracy enabled the Holocaust by reducing it to a long line of people taking orders from their superiors and giving orders to their subordinates so they could compartmentalise their actions to inputs and outputs, until it got to the people who actually carried out the atrocities, which even the Nazis realised not everyone could do.
There's also a great book called transcript by Heimrad Bäcker, where he uses cut-up bits of the bureacracy (as it sounds like you'll know, the Nazis were sticklers for record-keeping) of the Holocaust in a kind of poetic form, where sometimes the things are identifiable, such as numbers of clothing items taken from people at the extermination camps, and others are just lists of numbers or words leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps.
duxup
I fear a lot of people are happy to look the other way when “my guy” is doing something, especially when it seems to be directed at whatever they fear.
That and I fear most people really don’t have any principles when push comes to shove.
potato3732842
Exactly. And that lack of principals is what we should be punishing as a society, not any particular position. The rest will work itself out in time.
sitkack
People with principles are dangerous precisely because they aren’t bending the rules in support of the body politic.
You want a boy scout that focuses more on the group than the ideals.
tommiegannert
Just keep voting for different parties/people. It's when they're able to say "I'll be in power for a long time" that the upper echelons and the army start backing their person rather than the people. Oh, and avoid having loop holes in the constitution.
gpvos
As long as you can, see Germany's 1938 "election": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_German_parliamentary_el...
I doubt that that was constitutional, but maybe it was, after all they got in power legally in 1933.
smcin
Interesting snippet:
> The recently completed Kraft durch Freude cruise ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was anchored in international waters near the United Kingdom to serve as a floating polling station for German and Austrian citizens living in the UK. On 10 April 1938, 1,978 voters (including 806 Austrians) were ferried from Tilbury, east of London.
usefulcat
That only works as long as fair elections are still a thing.
ashoeafoot
Also the suffering they cause remains abstract due to scale. Everyone of those bunkers financially ruined a few families and the future of their offspring.
IncreasePosts
Well, let's look at what was happening in Albania.
Since forever: Ruled by ottoman empire
...along comes the 20th century...
1912: We declare independence!
1914: Let's pick a king...
1925: Let's pick a new king...
1939: I guess the Italians are king now...
1944: Communism, we're all kings!
1946: Hoxha is the king of kings
thih9
1991: nope, let’s elect a parliament
1997: one more time and without pyramid schemes[1]
2009: nato
2014: official eu candidate
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania
vasco
The pyramid scheme one is scary, I wonder what will happen when crypto collapses. It's gotten so big that it infects the rest of the financial system in a big way already - globally.
Yawrehto
"Everyone is a king, but some kings are more kingly than others."
Fun fact about World War II Albania: pretty much uniquely, especially in the region (Yugoslavia had a death rate of over 80 percent, with some regions having death rates closer to 90 percent[1][2][3]) they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-los...
[2] Technically Montenegro had a death rate of 93 percent, but in practice that was 28 out of 30 Jews, so I'm not counting them.
[3] Long digression: That was not the worst, by the way. The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them, and killed many of the survivors who tried to return home. A quick estimate, putting Poland's death rate at even 80% and 3 million Jews, means that if you said 'death rate for Europe except for Poland', i.e., pretending Poland wasn't in Europe, the overall death rate drops to 40%. Without that, i.e., including Poland, it is at 66%. All six death camps were located in Poland. They were 10% Jewish before the war and roughly 0.02% of it today even by generous estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#B...). By literally any measure--even the most generous possible for Poland and least generous for others--all three of their total population (10,000), percent of the world Jewish population (0.048) and numbers per million Poles (267) are lower (or equal to) than those for such famously Jewish countries as Panama, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, or Mexico. If you're ever told you're going to be teleported to some German-occupied country in World War Two as a Jew, don't pick Poland.
KptMarchewa
>The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them
Wow, that was done by Poles in Poland? How did that happen? Certainly the whole nation had to be behind this? [0]
>some German-occupied country in World War Two
Ah, the bare minimum mention at the end.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_Among_the_Nations#Nu...
GJim
> Fun fact about World War II Albania...... they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.
That is perhaps an interesting fact. But not really a fun one.
mastazi
I love Albania, for reasons related to my job I used to travel there multiple times a year until around 2010.
Those bunkers are absolutely everywhere, even right in the middle of nowhere (I guess that's useful if you happen to get lost in the wilderness while hiking).
In towns and cities they have been sometimes repurposed, e.g. I remember seeing that someone created a small cafe on the beach using one of the larger bunkers.
The problem with reusing them is that the vast majority of the bunkers are of the smaller type (mostly below ground level, and on the inside there is barely enough room for a couple of people) and it's hard to find a new purpose for those.
leapingdog
I witnessed some of those bunkers on a day trip to [0]Butrint. The tour guide told us they were constantly being told the country was on the cusp of foreign invasion during the dictatorship.
The locals had painted the domes in bright colours as a sort of added tourist attraction.
AdrianB1
Same for me, I used to travel for work earlier (2002-2006) and I loved it. The only problem at that time was the language barrier, almost nobody was speaking English in the eastern part and just a few people in Tirana or Dures.
In 2009 I tried to go there with a friend on a motorcycle trip, but we were unable to get in the country due to language barrier, I don't know what was wrong. So we went to Ohrid instead.
mastazi
I'm Italian so I had an advantage in terms of language, since it seems almost everyone understands it. I've been told it's because people used to illegally watch Italian TV under the communist regime. I guess it might be also related to past colonialism.
euroderf
Japan has the famous "love hotels". If the bunkers fit two...
walrus01
'albanian concrete fuck hovel' could be a punk band name
frereubu
"Love bunker" has a certain ring to it.
dibujaron
Further down the wiki article, it mentions that the bunkers re indeed often used for this :)
HeatrayEnjoyer
Public restroom
Suicide booth
pmontra
Ah Albanian mason who has been living in Italy since the 90s told me a story about bunkers. I cannot date it to a year nor assess its truth but here it is.
A Minister (maybe Defense? Army? whatever) went to check the new bunkers. They looked good but he asked to the chief engineer how he could be sure that Hoxha would be satisfied with them.
"You know, if he thinks they are not good I'm dead."
"They are very good."
"So you must get in. We will shell the bunker and check if it's really as good as you say."
The engineer was not happy with that but the choice was between getting in or die immediately. He got in and they shelled the bunker all day long. The bunker survived, the engineer eventually recovered from the experience (temporary deafness and other problems) and the Minister could bet his own life on those bunkers.
sokols
Yes this is a widely circulating anecdote. That Minister was Mehmet Shehu[0], an interesting character in his own right.
PestoDiRucola
And the guy that was forced to get inside the bunker was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Moisiu
ajxs
Albania is definitely worth visiting. BUNK'ART in Tirana is an easy way to see the bunkers for yourself.
Somewhat related: Famous Russian urbex photographer Lana Sator is still stuck in Albania, after being arrested for espionage while documenting Albania's abandoned cold war military infrastructure: https://archive.is/o7rgB
For what it's worth, she is a well known photographer. I've been following her work since the early 2010s.
mastax
> The construction of prefabricated bunkers alone cost an estimated two percent of net material product, and in total the bunkers cost more than twice as much as the Maginot Line in France, consuming three times as much concrete.
Incredible.
jajko
There is a reason why Albania was for a long time the poorest country in Europe. This is one of the reasons, maybe the largest one.
Theodores
We are always fighting the last war, and, as Ukraine has proven, much has changed. The situation for Ukraine is dire, mostly due to a lack of manpower for the infantry. They are always on the retreat, getting holed up in cities where it is the tower blocks that become the bunkers. There are no 'big arrow' movements by the Russians, they only ever send out small groups of soldiers after lots of artillery preparation. Commonly available MANPADS mean that big tanks and planes don't go anywhere near the front. It is drone warfare.
From the point of view of the Russian side, imagine if Ukraine was littered with these bunkers, all of them filled with drone operators. I would say that this would be an upgrade on what Ukraine has with the trenches they have been building in the East since 2014.
rocqua
You need trenches, or something similar, if you are going to mount any kind of lasting defense. Specifically, you need a safe way to run your logistics (or in military terms: your lines of communication, which refers to your supply lines, not your phone lines).
A lone bunker is incredibly difficult to resuply, relieve, or reinforce. That is the power of trenches. They give protection for when you need to move goods, people, or information. If you can cut a defensive position off from any of these, it won't stand up very long.
You can still use such positions to delay. But Ukraine needs to hold territory, not delay it's loss.
bruce511
I've not been to Albania yet, so I can't comment from observation, but I'm surmising that most all off these bunkers would be pretty useless militarily anyway.
A bunker, by itself, is not much of a defense. It kinda advertises the defender position. Without writing a paper on the subject, the short version is that they're useful as part of a defensive plan, occupied by troops trained in their use.
Having a random bunker, unsupported, in the middle if nowhere is not useful from a defensive point of view.
ardit33
Most bunkers were in line of 5, and connected by ditches/trenches. So, they almost were never by themselves (unless in some isolated aerea), but in lines, and connected to a network of trenches. As the war in Ukraine shows, trenches are still useful.
There was also communication lines, (hard telephone lines), in ditches about 1m deep, in order to survive nuclear / emp attacks.
When I was a little kid, we'd play hide and seek in those bunkers, or we'd play 'castle take over' with self made wooden swords, romans vs illyrians as kids. (Or Albanians vs Turks). Which team conquered the most bunkers, would win.
They were fun as a kid, but we had to watch out for wild animals (or snakes), take refuge on those bunkers.
Now most of them are being scraped, to recoup the metal, so there are few left.
xenospn
Are you sure? I just spent two months in Albania and there are bunkers literally everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. I must’ve counted thousands.
ardit33
yeah, I get that 'you see them everywhere', but almost 2/3rd of them have been scrapped, and only the large ones remain, and some left in tourist areas.
So, you are really seeing the 1/3rd left. The bunker built out during communism, was truly crazy.
The_Colonel
> It kinda advertises the defender position.
Which can be a point. What do you do if you're a foot soldier and such a bunker is on your way? First, you stop. Maybe your platoon tries to find a way around it, maybe you call reinforcements (direct fire) to take it out, maybe you set up a heavy machine gun to suppress it while you cross it. But all of this takes time, which is one of the main purposes of such defensive structures - to slow the enemy down. Interestingly, such a bunker will partially work in this role even if it's unoccupied, since making sure it is in fact empty will still take time. Now consider that there's almost a million of such bunkers slowing you down. You also have to consider the era, today they'd be an easier target than in the 1970s.
bruce511
If it's just a random box you move left or right and keep going. Sure there might be a conversation, but frankly it's not gonna slow the army down more than a smoke break will.
phil21
The density of these things needs to be seen to truly grasp the scale.
Assuming they were actually all manned and able to provide interlocking fire as designed (a large assumption) - there would be no moving left or right. There would simply be another bunker or three in your next chosen path.
singleshot_
If you bypass a fortification, you just earned yourself an attack behind the front on your supply lines. The seems unwise.
This is the secondary point of a fortification (unless something has drastically changed since I was taught these matters).
null
esperent
> would be pretty useless militarily anyway
There's the commonly shared story about them that it turned out soldiers can't shoot from the smaller ones without going deaf, even when using ear protection.
I don't know if it's true or not, but having been in one of them, it seems likely. A concrete dome is pretty much the perfect shape to reflect all the sound waves right back at you.
adrian_b
Today bunkers could be operated remotely (using deeply buried optical fiber) or they could be even autonomous, so this would no longer be a problem.
etc-hosts
The opinion among the few Albanian history nerds in Albanian that I know is that the bunker project was really about diverting the country's resources into busy work to keep the population occupied, instead of investing in intellectually stimulating pursuits that could result in a threat to Hoxha's control.
sixthDot
Give me a single example of a useful bunker in the history of war. With my modest knowdeldge, from the Maginot line to the Atlantic Wall, none. They're pretty much like locks. Can be cracked with a cocktail of goodwill and *time*.
szszrk
Ok, but wouldn't that be also true if you substitute every "bunker" and "defence" word with "tank" and "attack"?
I don't see a goal of your comment.
InDubioProRubio
Counterexample: The swiss defense plans
PetitPrince
But the random alpine bunkers are not so random, as they are part of a National Redoubt strategy (doctrine?) that's a bit less paranoid than what Hoxha conceived. Reading the actual page let me know that Albanian Partisan had similar idea to the Swiss (mountain-based guerrilla warfare), but Hoxha just said no.
maxglute
Rare Earth - The 750,000 Bunkers of Albania
dzink
The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people, until the resources really needed are blown out. In capitalism, companies specialize on human needs and if a need goes away, investments can go down rapidly, unless the feedback loop is guarded by some government regulation. But when government is doing the investing, the whims or corruption of politicians has no feedback loop.
treyd
This is why a lot of the academic work on economic planning over the last ~30 years has been on shifting the coordination and decision making down on the hierarchy closer to where it's relevant and where the people impacted by some decision have the most to say about it, and instead aggregating statistics and issues upwards for high-level visibility (instead of taking a "top down" approach to planning). This naturally involves leveraging the communication infra and analysis tools we have today that just didn't exist in the past.
potato3732842
Being an industry full of people who's mostly worked their whole careers in centrally planned institutions I have full faith that they'll screw it up. Academia has (to use a broad brush) been lusting after various flavors of central planning for a century. Why would they stop now?
(That's a serious question, why are conditions different now?)
rapsey
Academic economics is cargo cult science.
euroderf
> The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people
This sounds like a political-economic analog of AIs consuming AI slop.
fforflo
Shameless plug (who would have thought): I've played hide and seek in Albania and used a bunker as a hideout. AMA :D That's one of the few experiences I remember when I was 3-5yo.
fforflo
Another Albanian thing worth mentioning is an extensive list of oil wells dispersed across residential areas see [0]. Family legend has it that my father almost drowned in one [1] when he was a kid, and a relative had to pull him by his nose to save him.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_in_...
gunian
The relative ease one could tunnel underground these days are bunkers obsolete these days? Could one build a mini underground city that is reinforced with all the amenities
matznerd
Not sure why Albanian bunkers are on the front of HN, but I've been living in Albania/Kosovo for the last couple of years working to use nickel hyperaccumulator plants to mine nickel (phytomining), while removing carbon with olivine minerals (enhanced rock weathering), with my company Metalplant...
I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro).
Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc...
The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania.
Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state.
So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc.
But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans...
Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.
esperent
> Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong
I went there about ten years ago, walking across the border on a small road from Macedonia. The Macedonia border office was small but tidy. Then there was a 100m no man's land, then a Welcome to Albania sign that was full of bullet holes, and a table of Albanian border guards drinking and playing cards. Super friendly guys.
We walked about 5km into the local town, passing tons of these bunkers. Nearly every single car and truck that passed us was a Mercedes, except for the police cars which were tiny battered Fiats.
Can confirm the people we met were incredibly friendly, and the place felt very welcoming and nothing happened to make me feel unsafe.
However, I have heard some crazy stories from another friend who travelled there more extensively that make me think, while it's a relatively safe country as a tourist, it won't be uneventful if you stay there a while, especially if you get off the normal tourist track.
Given that most of the stereotypes I'd heard about Albania up to that point were "bunkers, lawlessness, and Mercedes but lovely people", I'd say that it absolutely did live up to these. However, a lot can change in a decade so maybe it's different now. Or maybe we just went to different parts of the country.
The_Colonel
To avoid confusion, the Mercedes cars are from 80s or 90s. Not new ones, which are completely unaffordable by most locals.
stuckkeys
Not sure what you mean by that, but my last trip was last year, and it was new models also. Mercedes is like the Theme there. Most lovable car in Albania.
xenospn
Tirana is full of coffee shops that are full of groups of 3-4 guys who sit around smoking and drinking coffee all day, eventually leaving in brand new 2024 S-Class Mercedes or range rovers. There are tons of brand new luxury German cars everywhere.
wil421
My coworkers in the former Yugoslavia countries said they import cars from Germany after TUF denies them. I think they are getter “newer” cars now, newer meaning 10-15 years old.
frereubu
Rightly or wrongly, in the UK Albians have a terrible reputation for organised crime, particularly drugs.[0] How is that perceived in Albania, and is organised crime a big issue in Albania? You make it sound like everybody is very trusting there.
My only direct interactions with Albanians here was a restaurant I used to go to regularly in London which was run by Albanians, who were all lovely and recommended books by Ismail Kadare, particularly The General of the Dead Army, which I thought was wonderful.
[0] Rather like the philosophical game "All crows are black, but not all black birds are crows" I have a feeling this may be due to a majority of illegal drug networks being run by Albanians, even though a large majority of Albians in the UK have no involvement in it.
quotz
Most of the leading crime gangs in europe and worldwide are Albanian [0]. They are a global operation thats present in almost every country thats relevant to the drug trade, and thats as a result of their massive diaspora (something like 30%-40% of their whole population has fled albania since the 80s). VICE declared Albania as the first and only european narco-state.[1] I actually have a friend who worked for the UN researching the narco economy in Albania, and the conclusion was that the GDP of the drug trade was half the GDP of the whole country [2]. In 2014 there was an incident where Dutch tourists that were hiking the mountains there accidentally discovered endless cannabis plantations and posted it on YouTube after leaving the country. This prompted wide outrage everywhere in Europe, and hence the Albanian government had to do something to save face, and they burned all the crops there in the region.[3] The thing is, the government and the narcos are all the same. Albania is still the major exporter of cannabis across Europe, and Albania is still the reigning king of drug transport. The Italian mafia is closely associated and probably dwarfed by the Albanian mafia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_mafia
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-inside-story-of-europes-...
[2] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/albania-dr...
quasse
What is the general view on Enver Hoxha by today's Albanian population?
tamentis
My wife is Albanian, I lived there in 2021/2022.
I found that many people think positively of the regime and its dictator. The population was ill-equipped to deal with a market economy when the regime fell, and many Albanians believe the country has gone down a very chaotic path. They thought the dictatorship provided more structure. My grandmother-in-law (in her 60s), whose family suffered greatly when Hoxha took over, is one such Albanian who thinks positively of him, despite how the regime treated them. This feels a bit like Stockholm syndrome.
Der_Einzige
This mass Stockholm syndrome shit that every post communist country goes through with their hitler-tier leaders is evidence for me that god doesn't exist, and that we deserve the leaders we get.
I swear to god, we could liberate North Korea and they'd turn around and cry about how good it was during the Kim era because apparently we humans are deeply masochistic to our core. We want the boot stomping on our face forever.
rkachowski
I was in Tirana last October, he seems to be treated as some kind of whimsical amusement and mascot rather than a historical tyrant. His residence is still intact and visible in the city center and is something of a tourist photo opportunity. AFAIK it's fully closed, but from the top of the rotating restaurant nearby you can see into it.
lormayna
I am Italian, I know many Albanians and I visited the country too. As far as I know there is still somebody that feel nostalgia about the dictator, but 90% of the people are really happy about the democracy and they want to join the UE. Just to give an anedoct: in front of Berat there is a mountain where Oxha wrote with trees his name Enver. After the end of communism, they changed in Never.
quotz
The gratitude they have towards America is due to the USA declaring war against Yugoslavia and Serbia, and "liberating" Kosovo. Bill Clinton is considered a national hero and even has a monument declared to him, and even boulevards are named after him. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_Boulevard#/media/...
philshem
> Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because…
Albanians gratitude to the USA continues beyond Woodrow Wilson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_Boulevard
pitaj
I'm visiting Tirana in March. Any must-see suggestions?
What was your favorite Albanian dish?
madjam002
Drive down to Lili’s restaurant in Berat and order everything on the menu (it’s small), and visit the castle while you’re there. It’s well worth it. You will need to make a reservation. It’s probably the most unique dining experience I’ve ever had, and the food was exceptional.
You can visit Bunk’Art in Tirana and then take the cable car up the mountain afterwards.
Lamar Tirana had some incredible sea bass.
Odas Garden is frequently recommended for local food to tourists but I found it to be overpriced and the dishes were way overcooked, but YMMV. The atmosphere is pretty unique. There are far better small time restaurants around for local cuisine (can’t remember the names).
My fav dish was Lakror, but it can be hit or miss in Tirana.
Do the free walking tour in the main square / Skanderbeg square.
There are bakeries everywhere, getting up early and walking down to the nearest bakery and getting fresh coffee and a pastry / burek and walking a bit in the sun is such a good way to start the day.
And I second the suggestion to go to Himare, we went via Vlore along the coast and down to Himare. They’ve built a new tunnel, I highly recommend avoiding it (I've heard it's closed now for final works anyway) and going over the mountain, there’s an amazing view point next to Mt Cika.
Get up to Montenegro if you can if you love scenic drives.
lormayna
Tirana is nice, I suggest to go around for the Blocku (the neighborhood that during the communism was only for the nomenclature) it's really cozy. Just outside Tirana there is an area with several artificial lakes, you should go there for a relaxing day. If you have more time, I suggest to visit Girokaster: it's a castle city 2 hours far from Tirana, where Enver Oxha was born.
For food I really suggested a restaurant called Oda, not far from Skanderberg square in Tirana: it's a traditional Albanian house where you can taste all the Albanian dishes.
xenospn
Go to Berat, then Himare, and drive along the green coast. Incredible drive. There’s also a nice ancient castle by Vlore with a great view.
I had never heard of Enver Hoxha until I listened to the episodes about him on the Real Dictators podcast. Very wild stuff. I find it really fascinating and rather sobering that these invasive authoritarian governments can one day take root and control most or all of the rest of your life. I fear that people's complacency or thoughts that "surely it can't happen here" are part of what lets them rise in the first place, and I wonder just how quickly you can find yourself inside of one.