Korce, Albania

It took roughly five hours in a minibus over high mountain passes and lush green valleys to reach Korce, Albania. This is where people live the traditional way. At intersections, people set up stands selling local honey. Along the highway, sheep, goat and cattle herds of varying size hold us up. Old men ride donkeys side saddle to the fields where they work and the donkey grazes. Haying is being done with a long handled scythe, stacked around a pole and topped off with a piece of plastic to keep water from running down the center. Some people have scarecrows, the more unusual being a giant stuffed teddy bear and a hooded black shirt on a crossed pole with a string of garlic around the neck. New housing is being built everywhere, even here, so much construction going on.

A fly-by view from a dirty bus window.

Korce is not really a tourist town. There are a few attractions but no shops selling postcards and magnets. A university gives the town life but Korce has another side, a poor side with rough crumbling neighborhoods. Of course it has its 'old town' area where so many 18th century homes are in terrible disrepair. No fear, gentrification is coming to Korce, slowly but surely, like it or not. There is a new, very modern pedestrian walk beginning at the big cathedral and ending in a traffic circle where I watched traffic wind around three dogs napping in the street, careful not to do harm or disturb their slumber. Amazing!

The Orthodox Resurrection Cathedral is big, shiny as a new penny, the town's showplace. Inside are icons with very different shading to the faces that I took to be part of a looser style of icon painting than that of the 'old school,' which has rigid controls. The ethnological museum has a large collection of them.  I was told that the icons in this cathedral are not frescoed into the walls, but were painted, then glued up. This man spoke in a tone that made it clear he did not approve.

The market is open-air on the edge of the poorer neighborhoods. It has the usual produce, clothing, hardware booths, etc. There are people who set up in the island between the streets bringing whatever they have, usually in small quantities. One man carried a passive young goat by its front feet, approaching people who looked to be in want of such a commodity; another man sat on the walkway with his live chickens tied together by their legs to render them docile. A box of snails sat by itself, oozing over the edges and onto the sidewalk. I did not buy. I found a small saucer I liked and the man gave it as a gift because I am American so I gave him one of my little magnets in return. I tried to buy one orange at a stand but the man would not take money for it. I finally managed to pay for a bag of cherries and settled myself on a bench to draw those neat little three wheeled trucks I am so fascinated by.

The owner of my hotel put me in a minibus to Pogradec and paid the driver extra to take me to the border. It wasn't a long drive and it wasn't so mountainous as before. What caught my eye was the fact that the area is so populated with little concrete mushrooms, bunkers that were part of the defense system devised by Hoxha, who no longer rules Albania. There is a pattern to them, I've heard, that they fan out in some strategic manner. I understand that there were larger ones that were manned full time and many smaller ones that the population was to jump into with their own weapons in case of attack. They are all over Albania, especially close to borders. I was dropped off at the border post and walked through, then down the road a short distance and through the entry post into Macedonia. I should have stayed in Albania longer.

This bunker is in a park in Korce, the only one I got close to.