To a restaurant in Tirana

Oda Traditional Restaurant, Pazari I Ri 

There’s a restaurant in Albania’s capital. Tucked away off a side street close to Pazari-ri market, it is completely inconspicuous from the outside. A tall white wall stops passers-by from being able to peek into its terrace - when you are inside, you get the impression of being at a local restaurant in a secluded Greek island where all the walls are painted in that kind of white. Men dressed in tall hats carrying their instruments journey through the restaurant, singing to various onlookers as they wait for their food. The food is served on huge plates - a mountain of bread, white cheese cut into cubes, rice wrapped in huge cabbage leaf packages, all placed on the table to share.

I have been to Tirana three times in the past nine months, a sequence of events I certainly did not expect to occur. Each time I have visited the city has been very different - alone, then in love, and then alone again. First in winter, then in spring and finally in summer. And each time, Oda Traditional Restaurant has served as a familiar monument, a tiny container of my experience in this city. Each time I went to this restaurant with strangers, and yet, somehow we always fell into the same rhythm. We would find each other in the garden of our hostel, or by chatting from across our dorm beds. We would ask each other where we had heard it was good to eat in this city, and we always seemed to land on Oda. A few jugs of wine for the table? Why not? On that first trip back in February, our group that began as three quickly became nine. We went around the table introducing ourselves, not knowing that by the end of the meal we would feel like old friends. I wonder what the waiters thought of us - nine strangers laughing loudly within this now empty restaurant and eating so late because we could not pause our conversation long enough to look at the menu and order. 

At that moment I don't think I could have believed how terrified I had been as I took that train to the airport. I had felt lonely in Lent and Skyscanner led me to an £18 flight to Tirana that was just a week away. My housemates warned me about organ trafficking and I boarded a plane not knowing that I would be back there again less than a month later with a girl I had just met, or again in summer, where I would spend two weeks amongst backpackers. 

In the Blloku Neighbourhood 

People have asked me why I am so attracted to Tirana and I can’t always give an answer. It isn't glamorous or particularly busy. There isn't that much to see and do and the nightlife is disastrous, as others have constantly reminded me. There are so many potholes, I can't even count the amount of times I've fallen over. It isn't the cheapest or most friendly city in the Balkans. The cars won't stop when you cross the road, stray dogs might follow you home for food and you never know if they might bite you. The best alcohol to drink is homemade raki served in reused water bottles and tastes like bleach. Buses never run on time, or they won't leave until every single seat is full. This is the city where I threw up for the first time in ten years, my biggest fear, one that I never thought I could survive. A city where I have felt lonely, where I have cried, where I have  been scammed…

The Park on the Artificial Lake

But Tirana is also the reason that I truly fell in love. I got to share a pomegranate by the lake and a jug of wine at a beautiful restaurant and make friends who made me realise that life won't just end when I'm 25. Tirana made me realise that Cambridge might actually be okay too, that I can leave and there will be more than this and I can be part of it. I got to see colourful buildings, street chess tables surrounded by tens of old men on a Thursday morning, book sellers lining their books up on the side of the road. I got to climb the stairs on the pyramid of Tirana and see the whole city at once, closer to those mountains that are always on the horizon. I got to wrap up in my coat in winter, wear a light shirt in the spring, and boil in the heat of the summer. Tirana was always sunny though. This city always has its way of pulling me in. The cheap flight was the catalyst, but what kept me coming back was those mountains, the smell of the olives at the markets, the lake at sunset, and the assortment of people that I encountered each time and spilled my heart out to at that restaurant. I think Tirana just might be the most beautiful city in the world.

All images belong to the author, unless otherwise stated.

Postcard from Belgrade

Mid-afternoon in Belgrade, everyone drinks their coffee outside. Even in this week of September, when summer is slipping away and the emergence of autumn is in the wind, streets are lined with outdoor seating. As the afternoon deepens, these spots will transition from cafes to bars. Wooden tables and chairs balance on a crooked pavement. Crumbling walls painted pink display messy Cyrillic at a cafe on the corner of Studentski Park. Here my friend and I drink our coffee whilst old men shout into the phone and other young friends exchange words in between breaths of smoke. This is the hour where brutalism is bathed by a golden haze.

Belgrade is a city of many lives. On one bank of the Danube stand soviet blocks plastered with peeling billboards. On the other, a half-city that resembles Vienna or Budapest - church roofs dispersed amongst old European buildings and tram lines. There's a familiarity to covering my shoulders to enter St Michael’s Cathedral or riding a crowded red tram through the city. I am accustomed to the kiosks selling magazines and cigarettes. There’s unfamiliarity in Cyrllic signs, smoking indoors, bus station fees and murals that declare ‘kosovo is serbia’. I am conscious of my ignorance as an outsider.

These epochs of history are visible in fragments. One piece lies in a socialist themed restaurant, where a constellation of red stars lie amongst strings of garlic and stacks of espresso cups. This past also remains in the maps, aeroplane tickets, badges, military hats and election posters that have made this time capsule, and again in the elderly woman who sells Lenin pins and old passports. Her shop is not far from the Bajrakli Mosque, a gesture to another past of Belgrade’s Ottoman rule. The weight of the past consumes me most overwhelmingly in Tito’s Mausoleum, a white building with marble walls adorned with eulogies, photographs of renowned visitors and letters of sadness from Yugoslavian schoolchildren. I find a strange peace in the untouched - this room feels like a portal taking me back forty years, the unchanging tomb boasts stillness amidst the endless flux of visitors.

And Belgrade is certainly moving. As the sun sets, us guests are seated on the stone steps of the old hostel building. We are connected only by chance. Dusk approaches and we get ready to cross the river towards the flickering neon lights of the party boats that emerge with the night. Amongst the music and fuzzy from the rakija served at dinner, we dance with Belgrade and I think of the wall of photo booth strips I saw displayed in the contemporary gallery earlier on my trip: friends smiling in fur hats and thick winter coats, a couple holding up their newborn baby to the camera, faces concealed behind costume glasses all stamped December 1988. I think of the children, now adults, who once wrote those letters to Tito, and the old woman selling memorabilia in her antique shop. They power Belgrade as it flows between histories, and I, an outsider to memory, try to find my own place within this city.