A couple of days ago I read an article in a German newspaper*, which was about a trip of two German travellers through Albania. By train.

Just like the flabbergasted reactions of the Albanians, whom the two Germans had asked for advice, I also caught myself reading the article like it was about the discovery of humans on another planet. The Albanian side of my brain was confused. There are functioning TRAINS in Albania? Last time I asked some friends, they told me that there was only a train-like collection of scraps, which had the complex itinerary Tirana-Durrës. After Durrës, the rails were broken and destroyed. Anyway, my friends would tell me, why are you asking? Who cares?

The German travellers cared. Ignoring the Albanian resistance against such a ghastly idea, they thought that the station names sounded too much like Middle Earth to exclude them from their route from the North to the South of the country. Have you ever met an Albanian, who fancies the names Xhyre and Rrogozhinë? This is not about the usual Albanian lament that ‘only foreigners appreciate our country’, but about contrasting the negative image that we have about our mothership, which also includes the non-existing love for the Albanian Railway.

There can be no love, if the idea of travelling by train has been totally erased from our collective consciousness. In a country that is known for – ironically – the love for German cars and the availability of numerous micro and macro busses, the railway has disappeared into thin air. Most people there don’t know how it is to sit in a train and enjoy the meditative scenery, while drinking dispenser coffee and reading a good book. You can literally see the time pass from the train windows. Moreover, trains are of course more ecological than (old) cars, which seem to have surpassed the number of inhabitants in the cities.

There is one more thing, though. The railway is also associated with communist times, in which the train was the only means of long-distance travel. I remember going with my parents to the town of Pogradec by train as a child. It was like travelling in slow motion. I think we reached Pogradec after 8 hours with the slowest train in the world. Only after the new roads and the new cars did we realise that that city was not even 2 hours away from Tirana. After the ‘great awakening’, trains symbolised the past, cars the future. During the armed conflicts of the 1990s nobody would be so harakiri-minded as to take the train. So, by now, as the German travellers could also notice, there is only one train going once a day from Shkodra to Vlora and the train really is a pile of scrap. A relic from the past.

 

* "Im Durchzug", Die Zeit Online, 21.1.2015