Maybe not everyone knows this but in Albania to date they are found around 173,000 bunkers built in the country during the Cold War and today largely reused as museums, warehouses, restaurants or even tourist accommodation. Does it seem like a lot? Well, think that the original plan was to do about that 750,000! But why was Albania so interested in these defense systems?
The history and purpose of Albanian bunkers
The Albanian bunkering program has its roots in the height of the Cold War. At the time the country was led by the communist leader Enver Hoxha who saw threats from all sides, given that to the south and west there were two NATO countries, that is Italy And Greece, while to the north there was the Yugoslavia of Tito. This sense of encirclement and growing paranoia pushed Hoxha to task the military engineer Josif Zagali to create a network of bunkers capable of both hosting the population and the army in case of need, and providing an additional defensive line.
This caused the construction of concrete structures in every corner of the country, from the coasts to the mountains and from the cities to the countryside. It was an extremely widespread project and, in all likelihood, its secondary purpose was to assert the leader’s power and authority. The most often cited estimates speak of an overall project of 750,000 bunkers but, to date, there is no concrete evidence of this value. Furthermore, the census of 173,371 bunkers mentioned at the beginning refers to data updated to 2014so today this value may be slightly different.
In any case, however, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of defensive structures. But how were these bunkers created from a technical point of view?
The technical characteristics of the bunkers
The smaller bunkers, called Qender Zjarriwere made in reinforced concretewith a wall thickness of approximately 60 centimetres. Each was prefabricated, had a dome shape with a 3 meter diameter and the main objective was to resist the artillery.
Besides these there were also gods bunker Of larger dimensions designed to accommodate called Army command centers Pike Zjarri. These could reach a weight of 400 tonswith a wall thickness of Approximately 1 meter and inside them there were not only multiple rooms but also advanced ventilation systems were installed.
Creating structures of this type, however, entailed an extremely high cost: it is estimated that the construction of these 173 thousand bunkers alone consumed the 20% of the country’s gross domestic product of those years, not to mention the fact that each bunker required a quantity of materials which, in another context, would have been sufficient to build a modest apartment.
Unlike what Hoxha would have expected, however, these structures were never used for their original purpose, with sporadic exceptions during the Kosovo War in the 1990s.
Today this network of bunkers is seen as tangible evidence of a cumbersome past. Some of these structures were demolished, while others have been readapted – like the museum in Tirana Bunk’Art 1 And Bunk’Art 2 – even if most are in a state of abandonment and progressive degradation.
