20+ FUN AND INTERESTING FACTS
ABOUT ALBANIA
This article was last updated in June 2020.
This is one of the least visited countries in Europe and a gem waiting to be
explored. It is affordable, it has good infrastructure and so many uniquely local
places that cannot be found anywhere else.
The other end of Mirror Beach in Albania
Albania has lovely beaches along its Adriatic coast, in fact, the famous island of
Corfu is very few kilometers away from it and can be seen on a clear day.
It is also a melting pot of cultures built over centuries, starting with the ancient
civilization of Illyria and ending with the Greek, German and Italian occupation of the
20th century.
Check out these amazing facts!
It has UNESCO Ottoman and Roman villages, deep blue water springs, mountains
and lakes. It was also ruled by the most totalitarian and isolated regime Europe has
seen, in power until close to the 21st century.
The country has seen it all and this means that it is also filled with the unexpected. It
is intriguing and surprising at every turn.
I hope that this list of interesting Albanian facts will convince you it is a pretty unique
place and maybe even make you want to visit.
There are over 173,000 bunkers
Interested in women-only small group tours?
Leave us your email to find out more about our solo female travelers trips to bucket
list destinations
Perhaps the weirdest of Albania’s claim to fame are its bunkers.
Albania has between 173,000 and 750,000 bunkers, although I believe 173,000 is
a better estimate and what the Bunk’Art Museum tells you.
These bunkers were built by the former dictator, Enver Hoxha as defensive
structures in case of invasion by enemy governments which, at that time, were pretty
much any other country.
They were designed to withstand atomic and chemical attacks and sometimes built
underground. As you would expect, they were never used.
Inside one of the bunkers in Albania
The bunkers come in various sizes and can host from one person to the entire
Ministry of Interior.
They are spread all across the country and you will spot them everywhere if you pay
a bit of attention. By the side of the road, up on a hill, near the sea. You can also find
some in Tirana.
With the fall of the regime, the bunkers were abandoned, went into disuse and some
of them, have been transformed into stores, shelters for animals, and even hotels.
Albania was once the poorest country in
Europe
With the fall of Communism in 1991, the local regime also collapsed and Albania
finally opened its doors to the rest of the world.
After its complete isolation for over 45 years, the country was backwards and had
barely seen any development. As a result, it was the poorest in Europe with a low
GDP per capita and a purchase parity standing at just over $2,000 per person.
Albania has since recovered dramatically and, while it still is one of the least
developed countries in Europe, it has far outpaced any country that shared similar
GDP at the time and today enjoys good infrastructure and perhaps a booming
tourism industry.
Albanians don’t call their country Albania
Albanians do not call their country Albania, instead the name for the nation in the
country’s mother tongue is Shqipëri which is often translated as The Land of Eagles.
This is why you see eagles as a national, symbol even on the flag.
However, some scholars have argued that the original word for eagle is spelled
differently and that we cannot ascertain for sure the word translates as such.
As for the word Albania, it was used historically by the locals and everyone else to
refer to the country until at least Medieval times. Even as far back as 2nd century
AD, Ptolemy referred to the peoples of the region as Abanoi.
It is unclear how the country’s name changed to Shqipëri but it is believed that this
was the word used to refer to the language which eventually evolved to refer to the
country too.
This double naming of a country also happens for Montenegro which is called by
the locals (and the Garmin car navigator) Crna Gora but internationally known
as Montenegro.
Google maps is not to be trusted
The pedestrian streets of Gjirokaster we should have never driven through
Driving in Albania is relatively easy. The roads are good, the infrastructure is new
and new highways are popping up every year.
You do need a lot of courage and bravery though as the locals are not particularly
good drivers and road signs seem more of a guideline than a rule to be followed so
you do need to have your six senses tuned in.
What is certainly not easy is using Google Maps. Surprisingly, Google Maps is
more often than not, wrong.
You follow its directions only to realise that the road, or the turn, or the street you are
supposed to take next, no longer exists.
I found myself in that situation a lot, both in Tirana as well as in the lesser traveled
parts of the country.
Albania is developing fast and this means that Google Maps cannot keep up. But this
is the case in many other countries yet Albania does not seem to be updated often
enough.
I submitted plenty of suggested edits and found lots of landmarks which were not on
maps. But most importantly, I also wasted a lot of time trying to find my way back
from incorrect Google Maps directions.
And as funny as this may sound, this also meant we found ourselves in the middle of
very narrow and steep streets in the old towns of Gjirokaster realising half way that
the car would not fit or that the street was only for pedestrians. Getting out of that
situation was anything but fun.
There were only 7,000 cars in 1991
There are now cars all over Albania
Much to the surprise of many, Albania only had between 3,000 and 7,000 cars for
a population of three million prior to 1991.
Under communist rule, private car ownership was banned so only the highest
ranking government officials and some businesses could own a car, the rest used
horse drawn carriages and bicycles to get around.
When the regime fell, car ownership became the ultimate status symbol and a sign
of capitalism. Today, everyone owns a car.
There is an enormous amount of Mercedes
Talking of cars.
There are a whole lot of Mercedes cars on the roads in Albania. This is obvious
to anyone who visits. But I haven’t been able to find legitimate statistics around how
many or data points to justify the reason.
There are a lot of anecdotes and stories that try to explain the phenomenon, many of
which turn around carjacking and robbery.
A German friend of mine even told me that there is a saying in Germany that goes
along the lines of “if you can’t find your Mercedes you should look for it in Albania”.
But how many is a lot of Mercedes?
I resorted to count them to find out.
We were on a road trip around Albania for a week and there were times when we
had long drives, so we looked for ways to entertain ourselves.
After the “I spy with my little eye” became old, we started counting how many
Mercedes cars we would come across on the other side of the road.
To account for wealthier vs. more humble regions and for any other biases, we
counted to 100 twice each time seeing how many Mercedes vs. non-Mercedes we
saw.
The result?
Around 35-40% of the cars in Albania were Mercedes.
Several Mercedes models
And this is not a sudden phenomenon driven by the country’s economic
development. Albania’s cars were 60% Mercedes in 1998, so the dominance of the
brand has actually decreased a bit in recent time.
A lot of the Mercedes you see in Albania are old models like the E Class from the
90s even some from the 80s, which looked more like boats than cars, with their wide
and often cream-colored chassis. But many of them are also new and expensive
models.
The question begs. Why do Albanians like Mercedes so much?
A lot of digging did not reveal much about this, but a few theories mentioned that the
car is a symbol of wealth and so preferred to other luxury car brands. However, this
would not explain the amount of really old and battered Mercedes Benz you see.
Other more interesting explanations talk about the historically bad roads after the fall
of the regime (remember there were about 7,000 cars only) which called for a
reliable car.
For some reason, Mercedes became known as the indestructible car, perfectly
suited for the terrible roads and favored by locals to “survive” the Albanian road.
But there are other more picturesque suggestions like the fact that Albanian migrants
to Germany used to drive back to the country on a Mercedes they bought every time
they were going home.
And, as my German friend indicated, because Albania does not check the plates of
used cars driven into the country against the European database of stolen cars, if
you ever lose your Mercedes, you should definitely look for it in the country.
There are no McDonald’s in Albania
Albanians love their cheese, but there are no Quarter Pounders
After 45 years of complete isolation, Albania opened up to the rest of the world in
1991. Until then, McDonald’s was a completely unknown name and it continues to be
so today, despite the company having outlets in 122 countries.
While there are some fast food chains like Kentucky Fried Chicken or Domino’s
Pizza, you will not find the burger giant in Albania. This makes the country one of the
few countries in the world without one.
Other countries without a McDonald’s include other obvious places like the isolated
hermit country of North Korea or neighbouring Montenegro where the Montenegrin
local food is far better than the burger chain’s pervasive menu.
Half as many Albanians live outside the
country than within
Like many other countries where hardship and oppression led to lack of
opportunities, Albanians left the country in search of a better life after the fall of
the regime in 1991.
They went primarily to neighbouring Greece and Italy, but also fled to the US. In
2018 there were 1.4 Million Albanians living abroad, about half as many as those
living in the country.
A positive effect of this migration is the remittance value that migrant workers send
back home, which represented 18% in Albania between 1991 and 2000 and
has settled at around 10% in the last few years.
This influx of money has helped the country grow and brings development and
investment to otherwise farming communities.
Poetic adventures by Lord Byron
Albania may be an unexplored Adriatic paradise to many but it was discovered by
Byron and his best friend in the early 19th century when they spent 10 days on
horseback exploring the country north of Greece then under Ottoman rule as part of
their Grand Tour of the Mediterranean.
In his trip which reached as far north as Tepelene, he even met fierce and vile Ali
Pasha who it seems, fell in love with Byron.
No matter where you go in southern Albania, Lord Byron’s poems and letters about
Albania make you realise the country was as fascinating then as it is now.
He sure was impressed by it, and this excitement can be felt in the letters he sent to
his mother, which served as the basis for his famous Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
poem.
Albania was the first atheist state
One of the few religious monuments to survive in Albania
Dictator Enver Hoxha declared Albania an atheist country in 1967 making it the
first country to lay claim to atheism.
The ruler was obsessed with his own very strict line of communism which he took to
the extreme and radicalised with time, even breaking ties with other Communist
superpowers of the time like the USSR, China or Yugoslavia in the 60s because he
thought they were not communist enough.
As part of his move to take the country to the next level of communism he also
abolished all religions and destroyed several religious buildings.
Only very few of the former mosques from the Ottoman times and Orthodox
churches in Tirana survived because they were considered monuments.
And today is one of the few European
Muslim countries
Before Albania was the first atheist country in the world, it was one of only three
countries in Europe with a Muslim majority, and it still remains as such today.
You can visit the other countries on an epic European Road Trip.
The list includes Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina plus
the transcontinental countries of Azerbaijan, often classified in Europe, other times in
Asian, and Turkey, which is renowned for having its most famous city of Istanbul
straddling the continents of Asia and Europe.
Islam arrived in Europe through both the eastern part by the hands of the Ottoman
and Persian Empires at the end of the Middle Ages, and earlier between the 8th and
11th centuries through the southern parts of Spain, Italy and Malta with the Moors.
The Ottoman Empire arrived in Albania in the 14th century and brought Islam with
them, spreading it to the country as well as other Caucasian countries like
Azerbaijan where they left an important imprint.
Frog legs are a local delicacy in the south
Albanian food is great and while there is not a huge amount of variation, it is tasty, it
is fresh, it is relatively simple and healthy.
One of the dishes which surprised me the most was frog’s legs which are a
delicacy in the southern part, in particular in Gjirokaster where they are commonly
found on menus.
The frogs eaten in Albania are wild.
Some of the least developed rivieras in
Europe
The Albanian Riviera
If time in the sun is what you are after Albania has some stunning beaches along its
riviera which extends from Ksamil in the south to Vlore in the north and covers
several towns of various sizes and lots of coastal territory.
Unlike the French Riviera, which is not only expensive but also very glamorous, the
Albanian Riviera is no-frills and very much do-it-yourself.
Umbrellas and sun loungers occupy the gravel and sandy beaches and the summer
months see an avalanche of sun worshippers. Come September, the beaches empty
and calm returns.
The city of Sarande and Vlore, at both ends of the Albanian Riviera, are perhaps the
most developed with a decent tourism infrastructure and cozy sleeping beaches
outside the peak summer months.
Despite the coast here being popular with locals and some tourists from
neighbouring Balkan countries, the rest of the world has not yet heard the term
Albanian Riviera.
One of National Geographic’s 2018
destinations
Albania’s popularity may soon change.
In their annual list of the places to go, National Geographic chose Albania for 2018.
Although their focus was on diving (banned during Enver Hoxha’s regime), the
country as a whole is one of my discoveries of the year.
According to the statistics office of Albania, over 5 million visitors arrived in
Albania in 2017, that is almost 50% growth from 2012. Needless to say, the word
is getting out.
However, this is still a small amount when compared to other countries in Europe,
especially when the numbers are looked at in detail and you realise that 60-70% of
the arrivals are from neighbouring countries.
To the rest of the world, Albania is still unheard of and the many things to do in
Tirana or Albania’s beaches, a secret waiting to be explored.
A hidden gem of affordability
The Plaza Tirana
Tourism is exploding in Albania no doubt. Despite the country still being largely
unknown outside of the Balkan region, development is palpable. But prices are still
remarkably affordable and premium options inexistent. You will not even find
any luxury hotel outside of Tirana.
There are a couple of higher end hotels in Tirana but that is all.
The former Sheraton, managed by MAK Hotel Group since the beginning of 2018 is
a decent 4.5 business hotel.
The Plaza Tirana, opened in 2016, is a luxury hotel bang in the middle of the city
located in an interesting beehive-looking tower with views over Skanderbeg Square
and sleek interiors.
Padam Hotel is a great small boutique hotel with the only fine dining restaurant in the
country and the place to see and be seen.
International chains are returning to the country. Hilton opened its first hotel in
Albania in the capital in 2018, albeit under the affordable Hilton Garden Inn brand
and not their higher end options.
But leave the confines of Tirana and save for perhaps an option or two for a 4* resort
in the nearby coastal city of Durres, you will not find a single 5* hotel.
The country’s highest peak is shared with
Macedonia
Shared mountains seems to be the way to go when drawing borders between two
countries. This is the case for Mount Everest, shared between Nepal and Tibet, or
Kanchenjunga shared between Nepal and India.
This is also the case for Mount Korab, on the border between Macedonia and
Albania and the highest peak for both countries.
The mountain is 2,764m high but it does not come out of nowhere. Albania’s
mountains cover 70% of the country and as you drive towards the south, you will do
so across mountain passes and valleys.
The capital of street art
Rainbow building in Tirana
Tirana is full of street art installations and public art. While this is not uncommon
of many cities today, it does contrast with the city’s grey concrete communist past.
Art is everywhere.
Sometimes it shows in the form of an internationally renowned art installation, others
as a wall mural, even painted as part of festivals.
Larger art expressions painted entire buildings or even streets, aided by the
efforts carried out by the Mayor of Tirana to revitalise the city at a low cost (you can
hear more about it at his TEDx talk).
Art on the electricity boxes of Tirana
Splashes of color also cover the electricity boxes with funky cartoon characters.
This disproportionate amount of color and painting in public spaces feels like it
is trying to compensate for the years of artistic ban.
Since the 60s, Enver Hoxha banned all forms of art, even at university, students
would not see any more art pieces or paintings from the second half of the 19th
century onwards. That means they could read about it, hear about it, but not see it.
After the fall of the regime, it seems that the country has concentrated decades of
artistic expression all at once.
Good roads, bad drivers
The roads in Albania are pretty good but the drivers are not.
Roundabouts seem to be for guidance and are rarely respected. Instead, as you
go into a roundabout you will notice that traffic from the right will get in regardless of
whether you are already there, forcing you to slow down.
This happens 100% of the time so it made me wonder what Albanians are told at
driving school.
Driving in Albania does require a lot of patience and to be super concentrated to
make sure you do not crash. People cut without signaling, traffic lights seem to be
only a reference, which feels like the law of the jungle.
I can’t blame them. There were so few cars in 1991 that most driving is relatively
new in Albania and it developed well after the fall of the regime.
Very cheesy!
Cheese baked in the oven
Albanians love their cheese, in particular a type of cheese very similar to feta
which will be referred to as such, although the word feta can only be used to refer to
the cheese produced in a specific region as it is a controlled appellation protected by
EU rules.
As opposed to other places in Europe like France or Spain where cheese is
sometimes served as a dessert, in Albania cheese is mostly a starter eaten sliced
with some olives and rarely as dessert.
It is also eaten cooked, baked, mixed with other ingredients like peppers or
tomatoes, cheese is pretty much the star of any dish in Albania.
Albania produces only 1 million bottles of
wine a year
Premium Albanian wine
Did you know that Albania produces wine?
Wine production is not mainstream and it comes in small amounts. For a
country of over 3 million people, only about 1 million bottles are produced which is
less than a bottle per Albanian in drinking age.
You may wonder if Albanians drink less wine and the answer is no, although the
distilled wine brandy called rakia and beer are quite popular too. They simply make
up for the rest with imports from Italy or Kosovo.
Further reading: We have written many other articles on facts about certain
countries, so read on if you want some great trivia.
Check if you need a visa, get help processing it at iVisa.
Never ever leave without travel insurance. Get affordable coverage from World
Nomads or long term insurance from Safety Wing.
I find all of my flights on KAYAK. Check their Deals section too.
Search for all your transportation between destinations on the trusted travel booking
platform Bookaway.
I book all my day trips and tours via GetYourGuide, they are the best and their tours
are refundable up to 24h in advance.
Get USD35 off your first booking with Airbnb.
Compare hotels EVERYWHERE at HotelsCombined and book with Booking.com.
Compare car rental prices at Rentalcars.com
ALBANIAEUROPEFACTS
0
