Summary
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- Shkoder is a big flat city, although old it's layout has been destroyed by floods and communism. If the old bazaar still existed at the base of the castle it would look great, but the river changed course 200 years ago. Now the town centre is 2Km north and way inland froom the lake and mostly consists of wide boulevards of communistt era apartment blocks.
- People met -
- Nikoli - The retired chemical engineer who speaks Russian and English
- Julie lives same street lived in Detroit 7 years, helps in family sheep milk restaurant above Theth
- People at the tourist office - friendly
- People at the library - friendly ... Good selection of books to borrow
- People at the museum - Zamir Tafilica,the Archaeologist
: Brothers : Professor Pisa donated a huge library of books about Albania
- Tani - Owner of the Pizza Restaurant who lived in Brighton
- Breadshop woman who lived in Adelaide for 4 years, but came back cos her husband couldn't get visa.
- Pavlin lived in Chingford, busy Theth guesthouse owner
- Timon lives in North-East London wifes family 2km north of centre
- Herri from village above Nicaj Shala
- Romeo who also lives in Enfield London
- Vladimar who runs an internet café opposite the hospital.
| Links
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- Virtual Tourist
- marvaoguide not great basic info
- shkoder.blogspot.com - A Scotsman married in Shkodra writes a lot of interesting things abou his experiences here
- Shkodra Places to visit
- New Museum
webpages, Museum
facebook pages
- history ..good
- http://www.shkodra.gov.al/ no english
- inyourpocket.com Shkodra good .. shkodra.pdf
- infoshkrodra.com List of Cultural Events
- council not yet in english
| Friday arrive
- ah the museum and library are closed until Monday
| Saturday changed hotel - explored north, castle
I'd stayed at the Hotel Parku she put me in a room with 2 Albanians for 700Lek, they were OK but the woman started cleaning the room when they left at 7.30am
- walked north looking for a room ..nothing ..Then came back to the main square ..what a surprise since the big Rozafa hotel there is being renovated ..it only costs 1000Lek
- Took the bus 2Km south to the Rozafa castle, by the river there is a small zoo with bears and a mountain cat in a cage ..castle has nice views, but nothing special really
Museum inside the castle
| Sun - work day
- then took bus to promenade and Buna bridge. Other side was a rough gypsy ghetto ... Hitched to Shiroder lakeside fishing village .. Not great .
| Mon - library museum
- library - good
- museum - was another Ottoman house ethnological museum ... It was glass case type museum so I didn't learn much
| Great Book about travel in Albania in 1986-2000
: Rumpalla by Peter Lucas
- Found this great book in the library. 30 years ago he stayed at hotel I stay at .. It was terrible even then .. Fascinating stories Edith Durham's trip to the Albanian Alps in 1908, the UK and US attempts to free Albania blown cos they put the communist double agent Kim Philby in charge,
- Burrel the huge underground political prisoner jail 100Km east of Shkroder.
- How the British kept the Albanian gold in retaliation for 1946 Corfu Channel incident when 44 British sailors were killed by mines maybe laid by the new communist government.
- The Hoxha shrines in peoples houses with unread copies of his book.
- Ghegs of the north half and Kosovo ... Under Turks 1468-1912 more kept their culture of besa (honour) and Catholicism.
- Tosks in the southern plains couldn't hide from the Turks so lost more like their Orthodox religion, but their language survived even though the Turks forbid it.
- The ethnic Greek minority - hid up further in the southern mountains. maybe 400,000 were oppressed
- His father had left in 1908. Both his mother and father are ethnic Greek from mountain villages near the border south of Korce. In 1986 he gets a wedding invitation and applies for a visa this time they don't refuse it, even though he is a journalist .. So he knows something is changing .. He is chosen to tour Albania and tell the outside world about this previously closed country
- During his travels he got to be friends with important people like writer Kadare and people who became top politicians. Describes how his dear friend Berisha started out with good intentions to leave the communist party and reform the country, but turned back to communist style paranoid totalitarian rule once his Democrat party started to lose grip on power.
.. and being friends with the pyramid founders was part of this .. He told the public the schemes were part of the new capitalist system.
- Rumpalla means "bloody Chaos" was a word brought back into use by an opposition politician to describe Berisha's rule.
- Goes back with a survivor to the crash site of an American plane carrying nurses.in 1943 when the Germans controlled Albania. They were led by British agents and partisans through the mountains to escape by sea.
- Tells how Kosovan refugees were accustomed to a higher standard of living than their brothers in Albaniia.
- Basically the book is a good history of modern Albania. 1908-2001
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Another virus : Dupler
- the cybercafe put a virus on my memory stick it creates a hidden folder called DUPLER with an exe run from autorun.inf .. It took me a while to remove it and protect the memory stick.
| Tue - Drisht Castle and Mes Bridge
- I'd lost my photocopy of the Peter Lucas book so I went back to the museum and found it. Whilst I was there the archaeologist showed me some photos. He explained that the Shkroda area used to be covered in ancient settlements and castles as it was the place of ancient trade routes.
A coin marked Shkodra from 350BC proves that Shkrodra is Albania's oldest existing city.- He showed me many photos - explaining how castles guarded the trade routes from Roman times. I knew Drisht Castle was in ruins, but the setting looked good so I decided to visit. - At 4pm I walked past the hospital to the firestation cos this is the main road north. I was lucky to wait only 2 minutes before the Drisht furgon passed. You pass old factories and the old cigarette factory (actually later in the villages I saw tobacco drying). ...after 6Km you turn off the main road there immediately is the Ottoman Mes bridge preserved next to the new bridge. 3Km you reach Drisht. The castle is ontop of the hill 1Km further. There are quite a few signs in Shkrodra, but none here so I missed the path. After the big hairpin bend the road climbs and just as you reach the first house .. Stop ..on the right is an ancient path with the telegraph poles following it. The road way takes you 270° right around the other side of the hill, but is much longer.
- Anyway I missed the path and ended up on rough goat paths and got right to the top of the castle ruins. Here's the view.
- So way down below to the south I can see the castle village : "A small mosque and a handful of houses, one of them a beautiful Ottoman-era house, now forms the Muslim village of Kale inside the old
castle walls"
- So there is an outer castle at the south base of the hill and an inner castle right at the top and along the ridge line.
- So I cut down the stream bed and end up in someones yard.The people here are different from normal Albanians as they are descendants of the Turkish. I saw only women and no one spoke to me : a woman ignored me and continued her washing. The houses looked poorer than normal, like there was no glass in most windows only plastic. The village has broken gate arches at both ends. So I followed the path west and it zigzagged down to that house after the road hairpin.
- People in Drisht were friendly. On the way back I stopped at the Mes Bridge ... Nothing that special either.
| Reading Kadare - He's not that good
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- Ismail Kadare's first novel, The General of the Dead Army.
This is supposed to be Albania's best writer ? Maybe his poetry is very good, cos this novel isn't
1. It's slow, what he says in 300 pages could be done in 100
2. The tone is grey and boring
3. The twist is contrived
- I skim read his 2nd book : The Palace of Dreams published in 1980, the book was almost immediately banned, showing that Kadare wasn't totally in support of totalitarian dictatorship. It's in the same vein as Kafka, We by Zamiam the prototype of Brave New World and 1984.
It is a not suble attack as the novel portrays a sultan who cates a huge government department to analyse peoples dreams a clear allegory to Hoxha wasting huge resources trying to monitor the people based on his own paranoid fantasies.
Kadare on Amazon
| Wed, Thu, Fri - work /reading
Wed - work reading
Thu - finished Peter Lukas book - started reading Kadare
Fri - finished reading
Sat - Sun working on Panama city hotel listings.
Mon - work, went to Marubi photo museum ..boring ..only 50 photos to see, rest on PC, but there was no power that morning.
- I was making plans to visit the mountains.
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