Despite police brutality resulting in several injured protesters, a group of Albanian artists and intellectuals succeeded in occupying the Albanian National Theatre, which is currently under threat of demolition, in the centre of the capital Tirana on Wednesday morning, as the Alliance to Protect the Theatre (Aleancapër mbrojtjen e Teatrit) reported that afternoon. For the past year, the alliance has been organising regular protests, performances and concerts in a bid to save the theatre, which the Danish investor Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and the Albanian government plan to tear down to make way for six high-rises and a shopping centre. It accuses the Albanian prime minister Edi Rama and Tirana’s mayor Erjon Veliaj of corruption and breaking the law.

According to the actor and film director Edmond Budina, who as the alliance’s spokesperson was targeted and injured during the police operation, it’s about the country’s cultural memory, and likewise about fighting increasingly totalitarian trends in Albania, which is currently in accession negotiations with the EU. A manifesto written by the occupiers appeals ‘To the citizens of Europe, To the architects, defenders of cultural heritage, To the community of academia, arts and humanities, To the legislators of the European Parliament’, calling for our support ‘so that this assault on culture and public interest be put to a final stop before it is too late.’

Together with Elfriede Jelinek, Händl Klaus, the IG Autorinnen Autoren and the German section of the International Theatre Institute ITI, we declare our solidarity with the alliance and call on European and Austrian politicians to support the campaign to save the Albanian National Theatre and to demand that the Albanian government abide by the rule of law and fight corruption.

Update 31 July 2019

The plan to raze the National Theatre and build a shopping mall right in the heart of the historical city centre is ‘Stealing from the Public’ according to Nora Sefa’s summary of her interview with the activist Besjan Pesha in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

In today’s edition of the taz, the author Lindita Komani reports from the occupied theatre. She provides more details on the government’s demolition plans: the deal was only made possible by a special law hastily enacted by the ruling party, which the president Ilir Meta deems unconstitutional. Furthermore, Komani tells the history of the theatre and the conflicts concerning the preservation of this historical monument. The National Theatre is more than ‘just’ a theatre, she says: built in 1938/1939, the building was the starting point and is at the heart of more or less everything that matters in modern Albanian culture.

For the German Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Rezarta Caushaj wrote a detailed report explaining the background to the demolition plans. According to Caushaj, the case is exposing a gigantic network of corruption, opacity and overt breaches of the law by the current Albanian government and the city administration in Tirana.