You have to bring your passport with you to buy your ticket to Albania. It costs €8 and the bus leaves at 6pm every evening. Unlike most of the coaches in Greece, you can only buy this ticket in person, and there’s little information online. The bus station in Ioannina isn’t busy but it’s never truly empty. It is a waiting room and a driveway. People rotate in and out of the same chairs and tread the same steps. 

I climb onto the coach and my ticket isn't checked. Not by the driver, not by anyone. No one seemed to care who comes and goes as long as you’re leaving. It takes around 40 minutes to get from Ioannina to the border at Kakavie. On the Greek side, the road snakes through foothills and crevices, and entering Albania from Greece is quick and simple by land; I would learn that the vast majority of passengers that make these trips in winter are Albanians working in Greece. I would later get the chance to see the passports that belonged to some Albanian teenagers working in Greece; the pages a tapestry of the word “KAKAVIE” stamped cover to cover. 

As soon as you cross over the border the geography opens up significantly into a wide glacial valley, with massifs skirting up over a kilometre on either side. For the first few miles there are still ethnic Greek villages, the inhabitants of which are thought to have populated this region for millennia; their grand crosses lighting up the slopes of the hills every few minutes.

I had crossed into one of Albania’s southernmost cities: Gjirokastër. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it draws many tourists to the south of the country. It is obvious why; it possesses a great citadel overlooking not only the charming old town beneath, but a commanding view over the valley and the road leading north to south. Then only above the castle are there mountains, though these you cannot always see. For days at a time, the mountains are obscured between thick pockets of cloud, too stubborn to move.

For a while at least, Gjirokastër marks the beginning of my purgatory.

The city of Gjirokastër itself is split distinctly into two towns. The new and old. The old town is much higher than the new, and to get there you have to summit a labyrinth of cobbled streets. The town becomes more beautiful the higher one ascends. The further up you climb, the older and quieter the city becomes, buildings become more beautiful and the streets more at peace, and journey becomes easier. 

The old town is a good way up and is quite small, built around a convergence of streets that act as a sort of centre. Think of it as a small five-sided crossroad at the very crest of a hill. Two of these streets head further upwards, one to the castle and the other to an Irish bar. The other three fan out downwards. The castle is the city’s highest point and is by far the grandest, seated closest to the heavens. Above that, only suspended above the clouds do the massifs sit enlightened.

It is a strange sensation being in this town during winter, it carries an eerie stillness; It is almost empty. I was one of a handful in one of a handful of open hostels. Naturally I spend a lot of my time in bars, but I’m the only one ordering coffee or drinking beers, where the menu is presented in English first, then Albanian. One gets the impression that the entire town only functions during and for the tourist season, and that presumably many of its residents must make work in other cities or countries during the low season. The majority of those that I saw and spoke to were standing on shop doorsteps, silently watching me walk by. O what a strange sight, to be one in a restaurant set for a hundred: less a king, more a usurper.

Gjirokastër was, in its own unique way, an exercise in purgatory. It has been hollowed out, and the people await intervention from an external force. It is reduced to a place awaiting consumption, by outsiders and tourists alone. This was no more clear than when in their absence. People’s houses, once people’s homes, converted into hostels, b&bs and short-term rental properties, sit bleak and dormant in waiting. Their shops, perhaps once selling goods and groceries, now dispense hundreds of little magnets and keychains illustrating a fabled Gjirokastër that no longer, if ever, exists. The crowd-smoothed cobbled streets and the skeletons of restaurants, their plastic chairs and metal tables abandoned. Their prices adjusted to extract value from tourists and in doing so, have alienated the local community who now neglect them altogether. 

In many ways, I'd learn that this situation is indicative of Albania itself. A land in a state of liminality. The country itself is emerging from a period of two monumental shifts: from Post-Communist Collapse to Late-Stage Capitalism.

I'd consider it uncontroversial to say that Albania once stood as perhaps the most unique perversion of actually existing Socialism in Europe. The particularities of its economy, the pendulum of various contradictory foreign policies, and the resulting isolation in extremity, resulted in Albania’s collapse in the early 1990s as being not only incredibly traumatic, but as particularly unique compared to conditions of other post-socialist states. 

In reality, the term traumatic does in fact very little to truly illustrate the Post-Communist Collapse that Albania underwent. It was a national peripeteia: the ground gave way beneath them, and what stability had once been secured through central planning collapsed into precarity. Debilitating economic shock therapy destroyed both the industrial and agricultural sectors of the Albanian economy. So much so that by 1992, GDP had tanked by nearly half its pre-1989 level, and unemployment rose to over 30%. 

Inevitably, unsurprisingly, this led to human flight.

In the mid-1990s, reportedly over 20% of Albania’s population had left the country for a life of economic exile, in one of the largest proportional emigrations in modern European history. Such was the scale of the exodus that by 1993, remittances from emigrants are estimated to have made up to 20% of national GDP. In essence, Albania had become a country in which its main export was people, and it entered a period of liminality.

For Albania in the 1990s, there was no fast or clear way out of this condition. It is difficult to rebuild and produce when productive forces have collapsed, and a significant portion of labour has emigrated. External inflows, be it remittances, aid, or investment, may have helped prevent famine and mitigate suffering, yet the population itself navigates, adapts, and exists in a suspended state. 

Tourism, then, offered Albania an alternative to remittance: a shift from the export of people to the import of capital. 

In the last few years, tourism has brought energy and optimism to a previously uncertain economic picture, generating two vital economic components: capital and employment. Clearly, Albania has emerged from its period of liminality into a major tourist economy, in which travel and tourism accounted for 25% of national GDP and 20% of all jobs by 2023. By 2024, it had rapidly and successfully developed into a major tourist destination, hosting 11.7 million visitors despite itself having a population of only 2.8 million.

Yet this rapid transformation places the nation in another stage of purgatory: a suspended state of structural dependency, where economic opportunity and cultural mythmaking coexist, viable yet precarious, and advancement remains subject to navigating forces beyond the full control of the Albanian people.

In the imagination of others, Albania exists as myth. It is a place of untouched nature, sprawling bleached beaches and ever-encircling mountains. It was the place with the mad dictatorship, concrete relics of communism and abandoned military installations. It is a cheap holiday, with the €2 pint and 24hr party people. These images do not arise from a deep cultural understanding, but from the outside world’s need to assign meaning, market value, and desire to the unknown. These are myths, consciously and unconsciously constructed and exported to commodify the unknown. 

A myth is not a falsehood or a complete fabrication, but a second-order signification: a layer of meaning built upon reality, where symbols, narratives, and cultural values transform everyday experiences into stories that shape collective identity and perception. 

Rather than simply reflecting the world, myths reshape the way we see it, imbuing objects, places, and people with significance that extends beyond their immediate, literal existence. It takes an object or sign, strips it of its own contextuality and repurposes it to appear objective and self-evident for another interest. It depoliticises, distorting the complexity of history or ideology and replacing it with a simplified meaning that serves the dominant order.

In his 1957 book Mythologies, Roland Barthes uses French children’s toys as an illustration of myth. These toys, he argues, are “a microcosm of the adult world”: shrunken versions of cars, soldiers, post offices, medical kits, hairdryers. At the level of reality, they are simply playthings. At the level of myth, however, they function as tools that naturalise adult life for children, presenting its conditions as inevitable. The toy soldier does not merely represent a game; it introduces war as a normal and necessary part of a man's life. The toy hairdryer does not merely amuse; it presupposes that grooming and beauty are essential aspects of a woman’s role. This is the myth of toys: the child "does not invent the world, he uses it", in doing so presenting the adult order as timeless, natural, and beyond question.

The Albanian Bunker developed a myth. These concrete domes, built in their multitudes during communist times to protect from imagined enemies, lie scattered across the Albanian landscape. In fields and on hills, overlooking roads and plains, on street corners and on long beaches, these bunkers were once symbols of paranoia. They physically represented the Hoxha government's opposition to its neighbours, and instilled a sense that Albanians needed protecting from the outside world. 

Yet the bunkers have mutated to take on new meanings, especially to foreign visitors. They have become quirky relics dotted around the land, physical manifestations of an eccentric totalitarian past, and mysterious photo-opportunities for travellers to share online. Fundamentally, the structures themselves have become commodified, not just in the virtual space, but in their transformation into museums, artworks, bars and cafés too. In myth, they have been turned from physical relics of paranoia, isolation, or wasted potential, and reimagined as consumable Albanian aesthetic. Trauma into charm. 

The bunker has become an empty signifier, divorced from its past, able to be reused, rebranded and commodified, to the benefit of the tourist industry, entrepreneurs and capital. Once designed for boys to be killed in, they were made with resources that could have otherwise improved the living conditions or even the productive forces of Albanian workers. Then, after the collapse, they became debris for farmers to clear, tool sheds and places of seclusion where young people sought escape, intimacy or silence. Now, they are marketed as just one of many quirky attractions from Albania’s quirky communist past. Trauma and space is converted into profit for the owners of cafés, hoteliers and developers to exploit, and symbols of suffering are trivialised rather than reckoned with.

This re-mythologisation of the Bunker arguably degrades its political, economic and psychological weight. It obscures and distorts historical memory, turning collective anxiety into a novelty, trivialising the authoritarian nature of Hoxha’s Albania and forgetting the monumental waste of resources which could have otherwise been used to create much needed schools, roads, hospitals, houses, sanitation and plumbing.

Though to what extent must we see the bunkers merely as objects redefined for the tourist gaze, repurposed for commerciality? Some locals repaint or repurpose the bunkers for communal use, subtly rewriting their meaning from instruments of paranoia into sites of local resilience, even as tourists snap their pictures. To what extent might this be evidence of a people actively reclaiming their past, negotiating the symbols of totalitarianism, and even defacing the icons of oppression in ways that assert agency? Is it so bad to re-designate these sites into sights, and in doing so transforming instruments of paranoia into objects of reflection, community, or play? In this light, the bunkers are not simply aestheticised for consumption; they are liminal spaces through which Albanians themselves traverse, confronting the weight of history whilst remaining suspended between past, present, and imagined futures. It is, after all, theirs to traverse.

Albania, as much as any other subject, is particularly well suited to mythmaking. The nature of its historic isolation, from both east and west, leaves a contextual vacuum in the mind of the outsider. 

Not only did Albania undergo near-complete isolation during the Cold War, in some ways the seclusion continued far beyond when compared to other post-socialist states. The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe led to a monumental rush by both insiders and outsiders to create new narratives, new histories, new myths. East Germany was engulfed into West Germany. Estonia pursued a Nordic heritage, Transnistria a Russian one, and Croatia embraced Sun, Sea and the Second World War. Albania however, for the outsider, the western media and tourists, remained simply Albania. There was a vacuum of mythology.

The Bunker is merely one example of how Albania’s history has been aestheticised and sold; similar dynamics pervade its landscapes. The untouched (or undeveloped) Adriatic coastlines and alpine villages, so often framed as pristine premodern fantasies, are themselves spaces of myth, suspended in consciousness between the narratives imposed by outsiders and the lived reality of those who inhabit them. 

Tourism transforms these very spaces into objects of consumption, yet the people of Albania continue to traverse, negotiate, and reinterpret them, asserting agency within these liminal sites in growing contradiction. The result is a nation caught between projection and participation, spectacle and survival, a purgatorial state where cultural perception, economic opportunity, and social reality intersect. It is in these overlapping spaces of myth and labour that the broader, böser consequences of tourism emerge, shaping not just landscapes but the social and economic fabrics.

Myths do not just shape perception. They shape policy, history, livelihoods. If the economy is Albania’s material purgatory and myth its symbolic one, then labour within the tourist industry is its lived purgatory, a daily toil through which Albanians themselves negotiate dignity, the self and the hope of ascent.

Despite the influx of capital, it is not the Albanian people who are set to reap the rewards. Instead, it is the same people who benefit from mythmaking that benefit from transition to a tourist economy: the economic and political elite of Albania. 

Labour within a tourist economy is mostly unproductive: it does not produce new value nor expand the productive forces of society. i.e.: it does not create wealth nor does it create new services or commodities, it merely extracts and redistributes existing capital from visitors into the hands of elites. Therefore, the tourist economy becomes barely an economy: it exists merely as a conduit of capital. For capitalists, it is extremely profitable; for workers, it is precarious; for the people, it is stagnation. 

The jobs brought in by tourism (20% of all jobs), do not bring with them security. Instead, these jobs are low-waged, fragile and seasonal. Workers extract immense value through hospitality, maintenance, transport and emotional labour, yet only receive a fraction of the returns that their labour is directly responsible for. Instead the capitalist class, their bosses, the landlords and the hotel, bar and restaurant owners, collect the considerable profit, and spend it on luxury cars, gated homes and assets abroad.

In exchange for their exploitation, Albanian workers receive a rapidly rising cost of living as a direct result of tourism. In areas of regular tourism, the cost of groceries is adjusted to extract the most possible value from tourists, leading local people to either spend more, consume less or travel further in pursuit of goods and services. Furthermore, the cost of renting surges. Housing, divorced from market rates with state subsidisation during communist times, once cost between 1-3% of an average family’s income. In comparison, contemporary sources put housing costs at up to 50% for low-income families. This is, in part, a result of the rapid growth of the tourist sector, and the conversion of housing into short-term rental properties or sold off as holiday homes. 

Thus labour becomes purgatorial in nature: hollow, fruitless, a display of recognisable gestures and movements without compensation, gaining neither reward nor recognition for their incomplete toil after years of repetition. 

Not only is this economically unsustainable for working class Albanians, it is fundamentally alienating for communities, reshaping how people relate to one another in public and communal life. Individuals are forced to work more often, in less secure and greater depersonalising jobs, travelling further and further to spend more on goods, and at the end of the day may no longer able to afford to meet, drink and socialise in the same cafés, bars and restaurants. This results in an erosion of the shared space: people no longer able to participate in their communities because they are priced out of them. Albanian workers toil side by side, yet their shared labour does not unite them; each is fractured by the demands of the tourist economy, performing the same gestures of service but for different, unconnected ends. 

In becoming a liminal space for outsiders to enjoy, it becomes a liminal space for local people too.

But economic alienation does more than just fragment communities, it can also seep inwards into the way individuals identify with themselves. When labour becomes synonymous with service, and one's worth is measured by the ability to please, perform, or endure, there is a risk that this logic becomes internalised. The very rhythms of catering to tourism: the demand to smile, to host, to retreat, may be unconsciously absorbed as cultural expectations or even traits. Over time, what begins as economic necessity may calcify into identity. What does it do to a society when it begins to see itself, not through its own values, but through the eyes of those it serves? Furthermore, as tourism reshapes the Albanian landscape, many working-class Albanians are funnelled into roles that feel less like jobs and more like servitude: labouring to fulfil the desires of others under underpaid and unstable conditions. These patterns risk forming a quasi-colonial, racialised Servant Class, dependent on yet impoverished by their economic role.

Racialisation, in this context, refers to the process by which Albanians are culturally, economically, and symbolically constructed as a subordinate class in relation to predominantly Western European tourists. This occurs not through explicit reference to race or ethnicity, but through reduction to fixed roles of hospitality, servitude, and picturesque traditionalism. These roles, aestheticised and commodified, risk essentialising Albanians as naturally deferential and servile, excluding their ontological self from participation in the cultural and economic narratives of their own communities.

Whilst the tourist economy channels many Albanians into such roles, it is important not to overstate this as a fixed or universal Servant Class. Rather, these patterns represent tendencies shaped by economic and cultural forces, which individuals and communities navigate in complex ways. Many resist reductive roles, asserting dignity and agency despite structural constraints. Recognising this prevents erasure of the diversity of Albanian experiences and underscores the ongoing negotiation between imposed identities and self-definition.

Furthermore, as labour traps Albanians in cycles of service, the commodification of culture mirrors this purgatorial suspension: heritage, like work, becomes performative and externally defined. Cuisine, traditional dress, and music are adapted to suit tourist expectations, becoming spectacles rather than lived culture. The cultural significance of certain dress, for example, may become dampened when it is worn day-in, day-out as uniform in bars, restaurants and excursions.

If this dynamic were to become entrenched, what questions arise for Albanian identity, both externally and internally? What happens when Albanians’ only experience of outsiders is as a Servant Class, and when their lives revolve around performing for others?

The danger is not merely economic exploitation, but a quiet erosion of dignity and culture through repetition. When people are persistently required to smile, serve, and accommodate as economically incentivised, aesthetically celebrated, and culturally mythologised; such behaviours risk being internalised as natural social order. Over time, these roles embed themselves into the way a society sees itself. 

This is how racialisation operates even in the absence of overt racism: it is structural, behavioural, and psychological. The tourist need not see Albanians as lesser; it is enough that they are always the waiter, the housekeeper, the authentic villager. There becomes concern that Albanians may begin to see themselves through the same lens. This dehumanising process, like colonialism, entrenches fixed social hierarchies legitimised by economic structures.

Repeated across generations, this could narrow the imaginative horizon of Albanian identity, compressing it into performance and aligning value with proximity to the Western gaze: Who are we, if not what they come to see?

This risks a loss of ontological agency, but this is not a fate Albanians are condemned to. Communities can and do resist the worst effects of over-tourism, as seen recently in places like Spain and Portugal, where grassroots activism and policy shifts have begun to reclaim agency over local spaces. 

The problem I want to illustrate is not one with tourists: Albania is a beautifully rich country and deserves to be seen. It is a concern with the model of unrestrained tourism currently unfolding. The scale of tourism far exceeds what the country is arguably prepared for, and one only has to visit Albania to see that the infrastructure necessary to host the current numbers of visitors is literally being built beneath your feet. What’s more is that  local infrastructure (housing, transport, waste management) is being overwhelmed by demand from tourists. A demand that is encouraged by the state, and by Albania's capitalist class. A healthy tourist economy must be carefully planned, regulated, and above all managed; without this, it risks breeding alienation, indignation, and leaving poor communities marooned beside a coast of riches.

So ask: why Albania? Why not Greece, or Italy, or Spain, where the pressures of tourism are no less intense? The answer lies not just in numbers, though Albania’s population-to-tourist ratio is among the most extreme in Europe, but in the very texture of its recent history. A nation once sealed off from the world now finds itself performing for it. A people once defined by ideological self-reliance are now offered a new myth: that their value lies in their visibility to outsiders. When tourism is not simply an industry but a state project, a national narrative, and a cultural gaze, we must ask not only what is being gained, but what is being traded away.

The transition from a post-communist collapse to late-stage capitalism has not liberated Albania’s economy, it has suspended it. The country now exists in a state of economic liminality: no longer centrally planned, not yet fully integrated into the European economy, but deeply vulnerable to its forces. This new economy does not resolve post-communist inequality, it procreates it.

The current structure rewards a narrow class of landowners, tourism bosses, political intermediaries, whilst the vast majority labour under seasonal, low-paid, and insecure conditions, cut off from meaningful, productive development or democratic ownership. 

It is not that the Albanian economy is stalled; it is that it is being driven, but toward a destination that serves only a few.

Tourism, as a sector, is notoriously unreliable and volatile as a base for economic growth. Albania is entering an international economic climate which, to the pessimistic amongst us, is on the verge of collapse. The death of neo-liberalism and the resurgence of global fascism, the contradictions inherent in capitalism bringing about its own collapse, the deepening geopolitical gulfs in a returning multipolar world order, imminent and inevitable climate catastrophe and the unprecedented movement of peoples associated with that, will bring about conditions that are not ideal for a tourist economy. 

If dependency on a tourist economy were a short-term plan, one used to rapidly import and encourage foreign capital into a country with the intention of investing it as to expand domestic industry, in value-producing enterprises, education, infrastructure or agriculture (similar to a model attempted by Yugoslavia in the 70s and 80s), then perhaps my scathing critique of the model would be dampened. Instead, foreign capital is absorbed by a narrow class who, like all capitalists, use it to purchase speculative assets, luxury goods and political power. They preach nation, tradition and culture whilst knowingly allowing those very things to be commodified and eroded. The danger is not only that Albania is being sold, it is that it's being sold out.

Purgatory, as a metaphor, illuminates the nature of Albania’s suspensions: it is not merely suffering, but a structured, liminal state in which for many the illusion of progress appears possible, yet is contingent upon ontological negotiation, toil, and external intervention. Economically, it manifests in labour that produces value for others without allowing self-determined growth; mythologically, in a history and culture perpetually reframed by the presence of outsiders; socially, in the repeated, hollow performances of service that shape identity without reward. In all these dimensions, Albania risks becoming a purgatorial space: its labour and wealth circulate without producing genuine progress; its history and culture remain suspended in narratives imposed from outside; its people enact daily performances of service and hospitality, negotiating dignity and identity without reward. Self-determined ascent is stalled, leaving the nation trapped in a prolonged state of liminality, as it has been for the past 35 years.

The challenge, then, is whether Albania can overturn this economic and political model: in reclaiming cultural narratives through engaging with history and identity without commodification. In redesigning a relationship to labour where workers are granted greater securities in their jobs, and have democratic input over the conditions and activities of their workplace, fostering dignity and agency within labour. Redistributing economic value where workers share in the profits of their labour, and can choose how it is invested. In giving residents and local people a democratic input in the future of their communities, giving them a say in everything from the running of local services, to the development of new infrastructure and tourist complexes, and even limitations to the numbers of tourists or in which months they can be hosted. Albania remains a breath-taking, fascinating country: the tourists will still come.

These obstacles are systemic, embedded in the structures of ownership, power, and decision-making that govern Albanian society. Only by confronting these structural constraints can the nation move beyond suspension, toward a future not dictated solely by external forces, but shaped by its own people.