We can Feel your Heartbeat, Albania.

How charmed we are by Albania and the Albanians. On the one hand, Mother Teresa and Christian crucifixes; on the other, tall, slender minarets rising like sharpened, shiny pencils piercing the sky.

There is the national pride of having fought off the Ottomans, yet also souk-like bazaars where the melancholic call of the muezzin brings back sweet memories of My Driver’s life as a young man in Morocco. But we were in Krujë, Albania, the ancient headquarters of Skanderberg, Albania’s national hero.

The alpine awesomeness of the north, where Aphrodite finally taught My Driver how to savour “kafe “, lured us back onto the trails. The hikes around Theth and Valbona were long, but the going was much easier than we had feared. Also, we chickened out as far as the “epic hike” from Theth all the way to Valbona across the pass was concerned. We took the Komani Lake Ferry instead. We did hike to the pass and back for the views. The views were majestic. The mountains are never without danger, though, judging from the plaque we saw on the way, commemorating the death of 25-year-old Flemish hiker Myrthe Baets in May 2023. It does make one pause.

What also made us pause were the preserved anti-nuclear bunkers in Tirana that were built during the communist regime of dictator Hoxha. In the early 1980s, when hitchhiking was still a thing, my high school bestie and I reached the border with Albania, which was strictly off-limits at the time. (In those days, we were always attracted by the mysterious and the forbidden.) I remember us longingly gazing across the frontier, which in my memory was a simple washing line that ran through a green and sunny meadow. Little did we know what was really going on in that small country, then completely cut off from the world. We weren’t allowed in, but Albanians got shot if they wanted to get out. Now, Bunk’ Art 1 enlightened us in a mind-boggling way.

Today, Tirana is once again making history, but of an entirely different kind. For a moment there, we even had to fight the urge to dye our hair pink and join the street protests in what is already widely known as the Flamingo Revolution. It started with young Albanians becoming outraged over an opaque backroom deal to carve up and sell off Europe’s last protected wild wetlands of the Vjosë-Nartë Delta Protected Area for a luxury real estate project. Since then, it has grown into an all-out battle cry of general discontent. According to the young people we spoke, it is not only waste management that is a disaster (it truly is). There’s a reason why there are more Albanians (over 6 million of which 2,2 million still born in Albania) living outside of Albania than there are remaining within.

Getting a bit of a grip on the situation is made possible thanks to social media and to the younger’s generation fluency in English. “My grandmother lives all by herself in a big empty house with 3 floors, waiting for family to visit. But my uncle in London can no longer pay the flight tickets for his household. In the meantime, my London nephews find Albanian too much of a challenge to get it right, so we switch to English to keep the conversation going. Nearly everyone here has family living abroad, which is one reason why we all learn a second language—usually Italian, German, or English. “ Or as Donatella explained :“True, the diaspora forces us to learn English. But if you want to graduate in medicine , like I did for example, a B2 level of English is a minimum requirement.”

Albania, we have felt your heartbeat How we loved your hand-on-the heart-gesture whenever you thanked us or bid us goodbye. May your “shpiriti” (spirit) always prevail.