scenery-filled for its own good. But the fields were only half-sown in midsummer, and out in those fields and up along the hillsides were hundreds of cement hemispheres. Each dome was about eight feet across and had a slit along the base. All the slits faced the road. It seemed to be a collection of unimaginative giant penny banks. These are self-defense bunkers. Elmaz said there are 150,000 of them in the country. They’re everywhere you look. They are Albania’s salient visual feature. The shop at the Hotel Tirana sells alabaster miniatures as souvenirs—model igloos, though the gun slots seem to indicate flounder-shaped Eskimos. In the cities, some of the bunkers have cement flower planters molded onto their tops, a rare conjunction of war and gardening. Larger bunkers appear along the beaches and at other strategic spots. The mountains are riddled with fortified tunnels, and even the stakes in Albania’s vineyards are topped with metal spikes so that paratroopers will be impaled if they try to land among the grapevines. Albania’s longtime communist leader, Enver Hoxha (pronounced Howard Johnsonish: “Hoja”), ordered all this after the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was sure Albania was going to be invaded next. Hoxha called for “. . . war against imperialism, against the bourgeoisie, social democrats, national chauvinists, and modern revisionists. . . . They hurl all sorts of foul invectives on us. This gladdens us and we say: Let them go to it! Our mountains soar up higher and higher!” But who’d want to invade Albania? Or so I was thinking as Elmaz and I drove past Albania’s Coca-Cola bottling plant. There, peeking out from behind a ten-foot fiberglass Coke bottle on the roof, was a sandbagged machine-gun nest. Maybe Hoxha wasn’t crazy. In the event, the pillboxes were no use against the force that actually invaded Albania, which was the force of ideas—though not exactly the same ideas that sparked the Declaration of Independence, to judge by what Elmaz showed me over the next week. Elmaz was studying to be a veterinarian. Everything had been stolen from his school: books, drugs, lab equipment, even parts of the buildings themselves. “We are without windows, without doors,” said Elmaz. “We study with only desks and walls.” The desks had been stolen, too, but the faculty had found them in local flea markets and bought them back. “All the horses we have were shot,” said Elmaz. Across the road from the veterinary school was a collective farm that once had 5,000 cattle. “They stole five thousand cows!” I said, amazed at the sheer
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