Welcome back, comrade

The middle-aged woman who runs a museum in the old home of Albania's former Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha - China's only cold war ally in Europe - appears nervous and deeply suspicious of visitors. She has good reason to be.

Thirteen years ago, as statues of Hoxha were smashed in towns and cities across the tiny Balkan country, Deshira Tena put herself at enormous personal risk to help keep alive the memory of the man who ruled Albania from 1945 until his death in 1985.

As an angry mob ransacked Hoxha's birthplace in the mountainous southern city of Gjirokastra following the collapse of the communist government, Ms Tena frantically threw artefacts, photographs and mementos of the hated dictator out of an upstairs window at the back of the museum to save them.

In the 1997 anti-government uprising, rioters were more devastating. By this time the building had been reopened as a folk museum - and the mob set off a huge payload of dynamite in the basement, almost destroying the centuries-old Ottoman house.

Now, seven years on, after extensive repairs paid for by the socialist government that now runs Albania, the home of Hoxha - the most ruthless of Eastern Europe's cold war tyrants - is once again open to the public.

In name at least, it is a museum of folk history but everyone in Gjirokastra knows it as the Enver Hoxha museum and not everyone disapproves. Like his old comrade Mao Zedong, his legacy is an ambiguous one and the fury directed at him in 1991 has turned to indifference in some quarters, and forgiveness and even nostalgia in others.