“Everything in the city was old and made of stone, from the streets and fountains to the roofs of the sprawling age-old houses covered with grey slates like gigantic scales. It was hard to believe that under this powerful carapace the tender flesh of life survived and reproduced.”
– Chronicle of Stone, Ismail Kadare –
Gjirokaster has two famous sons.
Raised in the same street nearly three decades apart, the dictator and the writer shared a love of literature, an alma matter, and a French connection.
Both, despite their vastly different paths, were deeply influenced by Gjirokaster’s rich folklore and history.
Whether through love or fear, for most of the 20th century Enver Hoxha – the resistance fighter turned Communist dictator – was the favoured son of this old stone city in the valley. His statue, once pride of place in the main square, was one of the last to fall in Albania as the one-party state crumbled.
The other, a thin bespectacled chain-smoker, wrote of tilted silver streets, blood feuds, resistance, and fallen soldiers. Constrained by life under Hoxha’s regime, Ismail Kadare critiqued under a veil of allegory and symbolism, until he left for exile France in 1990, just a year before the statue fell.
The freedom of one son – and the country – always intertwined with the rule and long shadow of the other.
In modern day Gjirokaster, vastly different but achingly similar to the one they knew, the contrasting status of their childhood homes reflects the stark divergence of their legacies. While Kadare’s former residence is now a testament to his literary works and status as Albania’s greatest author, Hoxha’s is an ethnographic museum a few doors down where one must open black boxes in a darkened room to learn of his ruthless cruelty.
One son speaks for Albania; the other’s name almost goes unspoken.
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