The City That Painted Its Concrete
The first thing about central Tirana is the colour, and the state of the concrete underneath it. Along the main thoroughfares, residential blocks built during the socialist era present facades washed in bold geometric shapes—broad rectangles of yellow, orange, turquoise, purple and green. Following years of neglect, Edi Rama, a painter who became mayor of the city, launched an initiative to coat the uniform grey buildings in saturated hues. There was no budget for anything structural; paint was what the city could afford, and he has since described the campaign as a political act carried out in colour.
At street level the two sit side by side. Weathered plaster sits beside fresh brushwork, revealing the coarse fabric underneath. Domestic laundry hangs from balconies against turquoise walls, leafy trees cast shade over the pavements, and warm sunlight sharpens the geometric boundaries across the avenues. The paint hides nothing. It simply turns plain housing blocks into something worth looking at, and that is what people carry away from the city.
The Stones of the Square
Skanderbeg Square, in Albanian Sheshi Skënderbej, lies at the centre of the capital: a wide pedestrian plaza with no traffic on it at all. The surface is paved in natural stone of many kinds, all of it quarried in Albania and the Albanian-speaking lands around it, cut to a single tile size. Supplying the square meant reopening quarries that had stopped working, which turned the paving into a working catalogue of the country’s stone. The square was rebuilt to a design by the Brussels practice 51N4E, chosen by international competition. The flags are laid in a subtle, low-sloping dome contour that allows rainwater to drain naturally away from the center toward the perimeter. During warm weather, shallow sheets of fountain water wash across the stone surface, cooling the paving underfoot and turning the whole plaza into a mirror.
The buildings around the edge come from wildly different centuries and make no attempt to match. Along the southeastern edge stands the Et’hem Bey Mosque, begun by Molla Bey at the end of the eighteenth century and completed a generation later by his son, Haxhi Et’hem Bey. Its portico and its dome carry frescoes of trees, waterfalls, bridges and flowers, themes rarely met in Ottoman religious art. The building was preserved during the socialist period as a protected cultural monument, and when the restrictions ended a crowd simply walked in to pray without waiting for anyone to authorise it.
Beside the mosque rises the stone Clock Tower, the Kulla e Sahatit, housing an interior spiral staircase within its stone walls. Across the square, the portico of the National Historical Museum carries a large socialist-realist mosaic titled The Albanians, or Shqiptarët, depicting figures from national history rendered in glass and stone mosaic tiles above the central plaza.
Concrete Turned Inside Out
All over the capital, things built to defend the country now do something else entirely. Dome-shaped pillboxes, constructed across parks and street corners during the communist period, still stand about the place. Rather than clear them away, the city filled them with plants, turned them into kiosks or simply painted them. Subterranean bunker installations known as Bunk’Art, including the shelter complex on the city outskirts and the underground installation in the city centre, have been converted into historical exhibition rooms and contemporary gallery halls.
The same thing happened on a far larger scale to the Pyramid of Tirana, the Piramida, on the central boulevard. Erected in 1988 as a memorial museum, the building was designed by a team of architects including Pranvera Hoxha, featuring heavy concrete beams that converge to form a pyramid. After a renovation by the Rotterdam firm MVRDV, the building is open to anyone who wants to walk up it. Inside the frame sits TUMO Tirana, a free after-school centre where teenagers work on software, animation, robotics, music and film.
Exterior stairways run up the sloping concrete sides, allowing visitors to walk directly up the structure to the apex. Stacked within the framework are colourful modular cubes housing classrooms, cafes and workshops. A building meant to be looked up at has become one to climb, and people sit on it above the traffic.
The Unsealed Quarter
South of the river channel lies Blloku, the Block. For years it was sealed off behind checkpoints and kept for senior officials. The barriers came down and the district was opened to the city. Bars appeared in converted ground-floor flats, turning the restricted quadrant into a stretch of the centre that fills up every evening.
Blloku forms a dense grid of leafy streets holding street after street of cafes, dining terraces and restaurants. Along the avenues, the former residence of Enver Hoxha, Vila 31, stands on a street corner, a plain house now used as a cultural venue. Pavements fill with outdoor chairs and tables where conversation continues through the evening air beneath the trees.
The street runs on coffee. On every terrace it is the same small ceramic cup of espresso with a glass of water beside it, and nobody hurries. People talk, read, and watch whoever goes past, and the terraces end up working as the living room of the whole neighbourhood.
The Clay Dish
The dish to order is tavë kosi, lamb baked under soured milk. Chunks of tender lamb and rice are baked in an earthenware dish beneath a rich baked custard prepared from kos, the traditional soured milk and yoghurt, combined with garlic and beaten eggs. As the dish bakes in the oven, the savoury dairy custard sets into a golden crust that balances the rich, tender lamb beneath.
The other standby is fergesë, baked peppers and cheese. Roasted sweet peppers are cooked with tomatoes and onions, then combined with gjizë, salted curd cheese, and baked until the mixture thickens into a warm savoury spread. It arrives still in its dish, to be scooped up with crusty bread.
Every bakery sells byrek, a flaky pastry baked in round metal pans. The paper-thin sheets are layered and filled with the same gjizë or with wild greens, then baked until they crackle. Meals end with raki, a clear, strong spirit distilled from grapes or plums and poured into very small glasses.
Under the Mountain Wall
Tirana sits on a flat plain at about one hundred metres above sea level, positioned directly beneath the western slopes of Mount Dajti. Its limestone wall fills the eastern skyline and changes colour through the day. The Lana runs through the middle of town in a paved channel lined with trees and walkways.
Summers here are hot and dry, winters mild and wet. As evening settles over the capital, outdoor lights illuminate the painted apartment blocks, and conversation rises from the cafe terraces across the avenues.
