This is a museum that is housed in an extensive bunker in the centre of Tirana (it's Bunk'Art2 because there's another, bigger museum-in-a-bunker on the outskirts of town, but that's a bus ride away, and was consigned to the "next time" basket).

On the surreal background to all this, I can't do better than quote the museum's website:

"The tunnel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was built between 1981 and 1986 and it can be considered as one of the latest 'great works' carried out by the communist regime within the project of bunkerization which started in the early 70s and led to the building of 175,000 bunkers of various sizes across the country... This bunker... consists of 24 rooms, an apartment reserved for the Minister of Internal Affairs and a large hall dedicated to intercommunications. Like many other bunkers of this size, this too was built to withstand a potential chemical and nuclear attack. Actually the bunker was never even used for training. The Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu as well as the dictator Enver Hoxha, who ordered its construction, never saw it finished because they both died before the construction of the bunker ended. The entrance and the exit of the bunker were built only recently, because on the initial project the entrance into the tunnel was possible only from within the Ministry."







The exhibits start with the evolution of the Albanian police forces (nothing if not confusing). Then you get to the most interesting segment by far, which is the one dealing with the activities of the police and the Sigurimi (state security forces) during the rule of Enver Hoxha.

The borders were closed. Albanians were not allowed out (starting from 1949, about 1,000 were killed while attempting to cross the frontier). And only selected foreigners (appropriately dressed and coiffed) were allowed in:



A really quite extraordinary amount of time, energy, and manpower was devoted to surveilling ordinary Albanians. Neighbourhood spies were deployed; and a multitude of cameras and bugs were pressed into service:




Public discontent with the way the country was being run often expressed itself in the form of anonymous letters, some of which directly criticized Enver Hoxha. Ferreting out the authors of these letters became a key task for the Sigurimi:



Of course, the state machinery involved interrogation, internment, detention, and forced labour on a massive scale:


So, that was our last Tirana Thing. And a sobering one it was too.

After that, we had to turn our attention to finding North Macedonian currency, in preparation for moving on tomorrow. (Note to other visitors and future selves: The exchanges that carry Macedonian denar are the ones in the centre of town, near the big square.)

It has been pretty mild here (cool mornings turning warm as the day went on, necessitating the lugging of daypacks to shed layers into). But the weather is on the turn, it seems. Today there was a little dusting of snow on the mountains around Tirana, and this afternoon was quite chilly: