Albania

Albania is the European country that travelers consistently describe as their best discovery of recent years, and it has been saying that for a decade without fully losing it. The country was sealed almost entirely from the outside world during Enver Hoxha's communist dictatorship (1944 to 1985), one of the most isolationist regimes in the history of modern states, which banned private car ownership, made religion illegal, and studded the entire country with 173,000 concrete bunkers as preparation for an invasion that never came. This history produced a country that emerged into the post-communist world with extraordinary landscapes and UNESCO heritage intact, minimal tourist infrastructure, and a population with a strong cultural tradition of hospitality toward foreigners that the isolation had, paradoxically, intensified rather than diminished.

Albania is also genuinely one of the cheapest countries in Europe. A meal at a good restaurant costs 7 to 10 euros. A bed in a guesthouse in the mountains costs 15 to 20 euros. A coffee in Tirana costs 1 euro. The Albanian Riviera, the strip of Ionian coast from Vlorë to Sarandë, with mountains dropping into turquoise water and isolated pebble coves that would cost 200 euros a night in Santorini, has accommodation starting at 30 euros for a double room with sea view. The combination of price and quality is the reason that everyone who goes comes back and tells people, and has been doing so for years without the country tipping into over-tourism in its most valuable areas.

The honest complications: Albania's road infrastructure, while significantly improved, is still variable outside the main highways. Driving requires attention. The summer on the Riviera (July to August) is hot, crowded, and the accommodation prices double or triple. Tirana is a genuinely interesting city but it operates on Albanian time, things happen when they happen. And the bunkers, while iconic, are a reminder that the country you're visiting was, within the lifetime of most of its adult population, one of the most closed and repressive societies on earth. The warmth of the welcome and the beauty of the landscape are all the more remarkable for this context.

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The Albanian people are the descendants of the Illyrians, an ancient Indo-European people who inhabited the western Balkans before Roman conquest in the 2nd century BCE. This claim to Illyrian descent is central to Albanian national identity and distinguishes them linguistically from their Slavic neighbors, Albanian (Shqip) is a linguistic isolate, related to no other living language, which puts it in the same category as Basque in Western Europe. The language and the claimed ancient heritage are the foundations of the Albanian argument for indigeneity in their own land against centuries of competing imperial claims.

The most significant figure in Albanian historical consciousness is Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu, Skanderbeg, a 15th-century Albanian nobleman who converted to Christianity from Islam, defected from the Ottoman Empire where he had served as a military commander, and then led Albanian resistance to Ottoman expansion for 25 years until his death in 1468. His double-headed eagle on a red flag is the national flag today. His resistance is commemorated in virtually every Albanian city. He is, in the Albanian mind, the reason their language and national identity survived centuries of Ottoman rule that obliterated the distinct identities of many neighboring peoples.

The Ottoman period (roughly 1479 to 1912) lasted over four centuries and left a complex legacy. A significant portion of the Albanian population converted to Islam, making Albania today the only Muslim-majority country in Europe, though Albanian Islam has historically been notably secular and syncretic, integrated with pre-Islamic Bektashi traditions and a general cultural attitude toward religion that prioritizes national identity over religious affiliation. The saying often attributed to the 19th-century nationalist Pashko Vasa, "the religion of Albanians is Albanianism," captures something genuine about how many Albanians historically understood the hierarchy of their identities.

Independence was declared at Vlorë on 28 November 1912 during the collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans. The border settlement that followed was deeply unsatisfying to Albanians, large Albanian-speaking populations in Kosovo, western Macedonia, and northwestern Greece were excluded from the new state, a grievance that has never fully resolved and that periodically resurfaces in regional politics. The interwar period brought a government first by Fan Noli's short-lived progressive administration, then by Ahmet Zogu who made himself King Zog I in 1928 and maintained an Italian-influenced authoritarian monarchy until the Italian invasion in 1939.

Communist rule began in 1944 under Enver Hoxha and ended with his death in 1985 (his successor Ramiz Alia oversaw the transition to democracy in 1990 and 1991). Hoxha's Albania was one of the most extreme communist experiments anywhere: the 1967 campaign banned all religion, every mosque, church, and religious building was closed, destroyed, or repurposed, making Albania the world's first officially atheist state, private property was abolished, and the country was almost entirely sealed from foreign contact. The bunker program, 173,000 one-person concrete mushroom bunkers built across the entire country at enormous cost, was the physical expression of a regime that prepared obsessively for an invasion that never came. After 1961, Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union; after 1978 he broke with China. Albania spent its final communist decades in isolation even within the communist world.

The transition to democracy in 1991 was one of the most chaotic in Eastern Europe. The 1997 Ponzi scheme collapse, when pyramid investment schemes that had absorbed most of the country's savings failed simultaneously, triggered a near-civil war, with the government losing control of the army's weapons depots (approximately 1.5 million Kalashnikovs entered circulation). The country has rebuilt steadily since 1997 and has been an EU candidate country since 2014, with accession negotiations ongoing. The transformation is real if incomplete: the roads are better, the cities are livelier, the tourism infrastructure has grown from almost nothing, and the country's extraordinary natural and cultural heritage is finally becoming visible to the outside world.