What Is Your Address?

Our address is boring; street name (Pandeli Cale was one of the signers of Albania's Declaration of Independence in 1912) and house number. Yet apart from the post office, barely anyone knows it. Street name signs reappeared throughout Albania only last year. So no wonder we had earlier rented a house "at Piro's square accross from the professor's" (Piro was a certain dissident, executed right there by the communism regime, thus the unofficial name, and the professor is still living there).

The other day I was browsing through an advertisement paper and amusing myself reading the addresses of some major appliances' stores throughout the country. A few of my favorites read: "Main avenue, "Xhevdet Neprevishta" neighbourhood" (in Lushnje), or in Elbasan: "Qemal Stafa" str., apartment building next to the former military base." (Mind you, these are large cities.) More often than not an address is "somewhere close to something former." So learning an address for a newcomer like me the enlightenment is double: I learn both where a certain store, office etc. is and, for instance, where a flour factory used to be.

With the advent of democracy in 1990, city planning in Albania went off the hook. Years later (some) illegally built structures were demolished, and some cities regained their shapes, yet others (like the capital Tirana) remain a maze.

The street name signs are in place, but if you want to find us in Korca, forget our address. You'll have more luck looking straight above the cinema (former cinema, to be more accurate), just below the water depot, and behind a tall green house. Alternatively, ask where a known writer Vangjush Ziko used to live or mention our neighbour's from across the street name.