Under the cloak of darkness, the diggers advanced on the Albanian National Theatre in Tirana to tear down its façade. 1,500 police officers stormed the building on Sunday morning at around 4.30 a.m., using tear gas and arresting 20 of the theatre’s occupiers. The Alliance to Protect the Theatre had been occupying the historically significant building from the 1930s around the clock since July last year, the conditions recently exacerbated by the restrictions on public life necessitated by the pandemic. In a festival that lasted for months, solidarity performances and concerts by Albanian as well as international artists took place week after week.
We showed our solidarity with colleagues and protesters in Tirana by performing FROST there – in German with Albanian surtitles (Lindita Komani supplied the translation) on 21 December 2019.

With what the taz refers to as a ‘coup de main-style demolition’, the government under Prime Minister Edi Rama and the city administration of Tirana created a fait accompli to support their plan to build a shopping mall on the site of the theatre in the historic city centre. The Albanian president Ilir Meta described the destruction as a ‘legal and moral crime’. Meta had refused to sign an ad hoc piece of legislation with which the prime minister Edi Rama had wanted to legalise the transfer of public ownership to a construction company with ties to the ruling party in order for them to build the shopping centre. The theatre alliance is hoping for European influence to be exercised on the government of Albania, which is currently in accession negotiations with the EU. The representatives of Albanian civil society are ready to continue the fight: ‘We measured the building and if we have the support, we can rebuild it.’

For the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the demolition of the Albanian National Theatre is ‘probably the biggest cultural scandal since the Fall of Communism’. The SZ journalist Florian Hassel claims that one historical building has been disappearing after another under Rama. The city is being buried in skyscrapers and apartment blocks; piece by piece, it is losing its history.

The theatre portal Nachtkritik points out that the now razed theatre building was only recently added to the list of the seven most endangered historic buildings in Europe by the conservation organisation Europa Nostra.

A detailed analysis of the conflict and its history is provided by Anja Troelenberg from the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

Update 18 May 2020
Today in the SZ, Peter Münch pays tribute to the role played by the historic building, which was constructed in a futuristic style in 1939 by the Italian architect Giulio Bertè, in the recent history of the country. From the show trials under the communist dictator Enver Hoxha to the founding of the national writers’ association and the beginning of regular opera and theatre performances, the highs and lows of Albania’s post-war history are closely connected to the theatre.

19 May 2020
In DER STANDARD, the correspondent Adelheid Wölfl summarises the events leading up to the theatre’s demolition and detects ‘increasingly authoritarian behaviours’ in Edi Rama’s government.

25 May 2020
The French daily newspaper Le Monde calls the demolition of the theatre an ‘act of barbarism’. For Libération, the protests in Albania are targeting not just the destruction of cultural assets, but simply the country’s impending descent into a dictatorship.