For four decades he ruled Albania with an iron fist, stalinist principles imposed and the West -Balkanstaat in isolation and poverty.
So the idea that his former house in Central Tirana could ever be opened for everyone and various, Enver Hoxha, the paranoid, withdrawn communist dictator who died in 1985 – that died exactly the point.
Until now, a vast, three -storey monument for totalitarianism, Villa 31, where Hoxha lived with his family from 1970, becomes a symbol of freedom and transformation.
The move will honor the promise Edi Rama, the Albanian Prime Minister, to turn the 43,000 m² ownership into 'something that Enver Hoxha Roll would make in his grave'.
Since January, the house that Hoxha built has welcomed visiting artists, who have been freedom to express 'everything, from anger to anger, to betrayal, to ambivalence, to absurd,' according to Stanislava Pinchuk, a 37-year-old, a 37- year old artist from Ukraine.
But what Pinchuk describes as the 'worst nightmare' of the Despot does not end there. In April the doors of Villa 31 are thrown open to the public, with tourists who are invited to view work made by the artists and explore the labyrinthine house.
As Hoxha once placed it in the address of a new year on the land: 'This year will be more difficult than last year; However, it will be easier than next year. '
The house includes a swimming pool in the basement and an escape tunnel that leads to an underground bunker, designed to offer shelter in the case of an attack – an unlikely scenario, given the sufficient security presence that the district patrolled during Hoxha's occupation.
Villa 31, once the home of the brutal communist dictator Enver Hoxha and his family, is located in the blooming BLLOKU district of the Albanian capital Tirana. It currently houses visiting artists
Enver Hoxha ruled Albania with an iron fist after he had taken power at the end of the Second World War. Hoxha, who was paranoid and withdrawn during his years, died in 1985 at the age of 76
From April, the doors of Villa 31 will be thrown open to the public, with tourists invited to view work made by visiting artists and the Labyrinthine -Owning
For Pinchuk, the library of the chain smoke smoking dictator has been a certain fascination point. Hoxha, a well -known bibliophile, had a preference for detective novels and was mainly partly for the works of Agatha Christie.
There are also books about sex that ordinary Albanians are not allowed to read at the time.
More predictable, Hoxha enjoyed Tomes from people like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin – Testament, said Pinchuk, to “an ideology that refuses to die.”
He also read about the French Revolution and Student Protests in the former Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the fifties and sixties.
In recent years, as the BLLOKU district of the Albanian capital in which the Villa lies has given a constantly contemporary lead, the trendy bars and clubs of the area have focused on the question of what to do about the former Hoxha house.
While Albania remains in the poorest countries in Europe, it has taken a long way since the Hoxha years and welcomes around 10 million tourists every year.
Some believe that Villa 31 should have stayed untouched, a grim memory of a repressive regime in which an estimated 100,000 people saw trapped, sent to internment camps or executed. Others believe that the house would become a monument for a past that most Albanians would rather forget.
An artist is seen by a room of the villa of the former Albanian communist dictator
The flag of Albania, with its distinctive black double eagle, is seen in addition to a work of art in Villa 31, where the Hoxha family lived his regime was overthrown in 1990
“It would have been better if it had stayed for generations, so that our children and grandchildren could learn from it,” said Xhevdet Lani, a taxi driver and a long -term resident of Tirana.
For Lani, the villa is 'historical proof of what the dictatorship once was'.
But for Nita Deda, manager of Art Explora, a French base that led the transformation of the building, the scheme is reflected 'The Power of Art to deal with a painful past'.
There is no good answer.
But while the house where Hoxha once watched video images of his political opponents who are tortured and killed, the scene of poetry lectures, experimental theater and film screenings, many can feel a dark chapter from the past of the country for once and for all to rest.
