🇦🇱 Albania
Tirana
Tirana (Tiranë — the capital and largest city of the Republic of Albania; population 910,000 city, 1.1 million greater area) is the political, economic and cultural capital of Albania, in the valley of the Lana River below the Dajti Mountain (1,612 m). Tirana is the most dramatically transformed capital city in Europe since 1991: under the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha (1944-1985) and his successors (the last communist government fell in 1992), Albania maintained the most extreme isolation of any country in the world during the Cold War — the most isolated regime in the world, having broken with Yugoslavia (1948), the Soviet Union (1961) and China (1978), leaving Albania with no major-power patron and no external trade; the country was declared "the world's first atheist state" in 1967 (all 2,169 religious buildings in Albania were closed, converted to other uses or demolished — the Et'hem Bey Mosque in Tirana's central square was closed and used as a warehouse); the 173,371 military bunkers (the Hoxha government built one bunker for every 4 Albanian citizens in the 1970s-1980s — the world's highest bunker-to-civilian ratio; the mushroom-shaped concrete igloos (the QZ bunkers, 1-3 person capacity) are visible across every Albanian landscape, beach and field; many have been repurposed as cafés, art installations, mushroom farms and storage units). The most famous post-communist artistic and political intervention in Tirana is the colourful painting of the city's communist-era apartment blocks (the "Painting the Face of Tirana" project initiated by Mayor Edi Rama (the artist-turned-politician who became Mayor of Tirana in 2000 and is now Prime Minister of Albania) — the project painted the grey communist apartment facades in bold patterns of yellow, orange, green, purple and blue, creating the most distinctive communist-era apartment aesthetic in Europe). The two Bunk'Art museums (Bunk'Art 1 in the former Hoxha nuclear bunker on the outskirts of Tirana; Bunk'Art 2 in a bunker under the former Interior Ministry in the city centre) are the most visited museums in Albania.