Abandoned History Museum with Enver Hoxha's Statue

An abandoned history museum with the last surviving monument to Enver Hoxha hidden in its basement. The building itself is quite old.

In 1943, when Albania was under Italian fascist occupation, Albanian partisans used this mountain area as one of their bases, and in March of that year they held here the first National Conference of the Communist Party, at which Enver Hoxha was chosen as the new leader of the Albanian communists — paving the way for four decades of communist rule. A few months later the General Staff of the National Liberation Army was formed on the same spot. Both events took place in a house that after the war was turned into a museum to document its history.

In 1968, for the 25th anniversary of the General Staff’s founding, a monument to the young Hoxha in military uniform was set up in front of the museum. In 1991, when the communist regime fell, the museum closed and the statue was taken down from its pedestal. Its fate, however, was left to the villagers — and instead of getting rid of it, they hid it in the basement, never imagining it would stay there for decades.

Since then the building has fallen badly into disrepair and is now in a dangerous state, but the bronze statue of the young Enver Hoxha still lies in the basement.