Albania opens ex-dictator's underground bunker to public
Huge structure meant to protect Enver Hoxha opens to public and is set to be tourist attraction
A gigantic, secret bunker that Albania's communist regime built underground decades ago to survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union or the United States has been opened to the public for the first time.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Edi Rama led visitors, including Western ambassadors, on a tour of the never-used 106-room, five-storey bunker.
"We have opened today a thesaurus of the collective memory that presents thousands of pieces of the sad events and life" under communism, Rama said, speaking at the bunker's 200-seat hall, which was to serve as the meeting place for parliament.
The bunker was built by the late dictator Enver Hoxha near Tirana, the capital, in the 1970s to prepare for a possible nuclear attack by "American imperialism or Soviet social-imperialism".
"The idea to build it arose after a visit [by Hoxha] to North Korea in 1964," Defence Ministry spokeswoman Edlira Prendi said.
Until recently the giant bunker still featured on an Albanian army "top secret" list, she added.
Hoxha died in 1985. The communist regime was toppled in 1990.
During Hoxha's 40-year rule, Albania was one of the world's most isolated countries, obsessed about an attack by the West. Now, 24 years after the fall of the regime, its countryside is still dotted by the remains of some 700,000 bunkers.
According to informed sources, Hoxha had at least four secret refuges built for him and his family around Tirana.
Rama said the bunker was opened ahead of Albania's second world war liberation day this month. The government plans to use it as a tourist attraction and an exhibition space for artists.
The bunker, 100 metres underground, houses a museum with pictures and items from the second world war and the communist regime. The heavy concrete and metal doors are so low that visitors have to bow down to pass through them.
In the small, cold and smelly rooms one can see military equipment used by the regime, mainly received from the Soviet Union and China.
Work on the bunker was completed in 1978, when Tirana broke ties with China. Albania had done that with the Soviets in 1962.
