Tirana: 1962

 

Tirana, Durresi: mosaic in the amphitheatre - Tirana, Durresi

Until the collapse of communism it was hard for any foreigner to get into Albania but it was hardest of all for western journalists. In 1962 however, James Cameron, a British foreign correspondent, succeeded. In his description of Tirana he wrote:

Down past New Albania Boulevard, down past Scanderbeg Square, where the vast statue of Stalin brooded over the […] banners demanding long life for the worker's state, Tirana petered out gently into a tangle of wayward little streets and lanes of unmistakable poverty and increasing charm […] there strolled the sort of Albanians one would not have thought ever to see outside a "fête folklorique". Half the people wore the drab serge of a normal urban proletariat, but the other half, without any kind of self-consciousness at all, swaggered around in […] the enormous baggy pantaloons of the Muslim highlander. Albania must be one of the few countries left where what is known as peasant costume is in fact worn by peasants. It gave the backstreets of Tirana a wonderfully rakish air.

The Balkans. Edmund Stillman. 1966.
[p. 105 / Time Incorporated]