By Ahmet Prençi
For many years I have followed the work of writer Ben Blushi with great interest. Since his first book, I have been intrigued not only by the topics he chooses, but by the way he presents them to the reader: with provocation, with courage, and with a language that does not seek to soothe, but to stir thought. In his books, an event is never just an event; it becomes a question, a challenge and a debate.
While reading the book “Historitë e çmendura të Tiranës” (The Crazy Stories of Tirana), I had the feeling that I was not reading a classic history of a city. Nor did it seem like a chronicle. I read this work as a novel. A novel with a very unusual main character. That character is Tirana.
A character born in the 1600s who has walked for more than four hundred years to our days. A character about 420 years old who grows, changes, errs, goes mad, loves, falls and rises again. Around it move hundreds of other characters, as in no Albanian publication to date to my knowledge, ordinary and extraordinary people who build their own destinies, without knowing that they are also building the destiny of a city that would later become the Capital of Albania.
There are thirty-eight stories, or more accurately thirty-eight pauses in time. Each one with its own adventures, absurdities, coincidences and madness. Stories that we often have not heard, or have heard without understanding them as part of such a great narrative.
The strength of the book does not lie only in the historical facts. It lies best in the way history is told. With a rich, fluent, flexible language and a rhythm that does not let you put it down, the book turns its more than five hundred pages into a journey that you experience not only as reading, but as a deep experience. Only a pen as tested as Blushi’s can weave documentation with narrative imagination without losing either credibility or aesthetic pleasure.
As I read, I constantly had the impression that I was watching a great historical television series. Each chapter was an episode, and each episode had its own tension, adventure and madness. A city built stone by stone, house by house, generation by generation.
The description of the first stone laid in Tirana, of the first house, of the people who created the city stayed with me for a long time. They are not frozen heroes in history, but human beings with ambitions, coincidences, circumstances and human folly.
While reading, my sense was this: Tirana does not emerge from this book simply as a place. It emerges as a living being. And perhaps this is the greatest achievement of this book. Different authors tell stories in their books. Blushi is the author who stirs them up. For some time, it seems to me that he does this with great style and finesse, without avoiding the chaos that he jokes about. His style continues to be distinctive, unique, free, provocative, often polemical, but always very capable of sparking debate.
The echo and the debate sparked by his latest book, “I Am a Muslim,” have not faded: a work that provoked readers to reflect not only on identity, but on the relationship between belief, history and our collective consciousness. And perhaps precisely because Blushi does not write to confirm convictions, but to shake them, his books remain under discussion for a long time.
For this reason, I secured the book as soon as it came off the press, so that I could be among the first readers of the book titled “The Crazy Stories of Tirana.”
From the very beginning, on the first pages, I had the sense that I was reading not just another book, but a work of broad historical, literary, memoir-like, dramatic and at the same time comic dimensions in the deepest sense of the word. Because life itself is both tragic and funny at once. What attracted me most was the way the author enters where history usually falls silent.
We have learned about the events. We have learned the dates. We have learned the names of the founders, developers and figures who accompanied the rise of Tirana. But we have usually known them only on the public stage of history: serious, monumental, almost without a private life.
Here in this work, however, the opposite happens. Blushi opens the back doors of history. He enters the dark rooms of their lives. He does not present them as statues, but as people: with ambition, jealousy, madness, passions, interests, weaknesses, chance and choices that have often changed the fate of a city. And it is precisely here that the book gains a novelistic dimension. Because history, in the author’s telling, is no longer narrated from above; it is narrated from within. In this book, the founders of Tirana do not appear merely as builders of roads and houses; they appear as people who were building the city while struggling with themselves. And perhaps this is why the book is read with the eagerness of a novel and remains in the mind as historical memory. And when you think you have understood the structure of the book, you realize you have only entered its first gate.
Through this work passes a whole gallery of characters, events and eras that make the history of Tirana appear not as a chronological line, but as a living organism. From the figure of Sulejman Bargjini, linked to the city’s first stone, to the search for the origin of the name Tirana itself. From the accounts of battles and rivalries among four Ibrahims, to the arrival of the Toptani family, with the backstage workings, alliances and clashes that accompanied their influence in the city.
Later, one of the most brilliant figures in the history of the capital appears, Haxhi Et’hem Bey, presented not only as a builder, but as a mind that understood that cities are built as much with symbolism as with stone. On this journey also enters the foreign eye of Edward Lear, who sees Tirana with the astonishment that we often have not seen. The enigmatic figure of Zenel Bastari and the legends of djinns appear. Ties with the Ottoman Empire return, followed by the turbulent passage through Austro-Hungarian, Italian and German occupation. Into this mosaic then enter characters who cannot be separated from Albanian history: Ahmet Zogu, Esat Pasha Toptani, Haki Stërmilli, Harry Fultz, Lumo Skëndo and Enver Hoxha.
What makes the book even more special are not only the names, the hundreds of characters. It is the stories hidden behind them. One example is the story of the Mexican millionaire who arrives in Tirana. The story of how the capital’s square was built and of the Hotel Dajti. The American bombings. The birth of the Bloc. The creation of Kinostudio “Shqipëria e Re”. The wonderful descriptions of Tirana’s neighborhoods, of Kavaja Street and the way the city expanded and was divided among eras, classes, powers, vices and dreams. All these events, some well known, many unknown, create a labyrinth of backstage scenes that the reader discovers with amazement.
And what impressed me most is that the author does not treat these stories as museum relics.
He brings them with realism, with irony, with cynicism where it is needed, with artistic finesse and with the kind of narration that does not sanctify history, but humanizes it. At the end of the reading, a strong feeling remains: this is not simply a book about Tirana. It is a book about us, about everyone. About the way we were built as a city, as a society and as people.
For this reason, it seems to me one of those books that are not read just once, but that should be kept in the library, because between its pages lies an important part of our history, the history of the land where we were born, lived and continue to search for ourselves.
A special and emotionally powerful place in the closing of the book is held by the era of the dictatorship, not only as a political system, but as a way of life, as a daily ritual, as an atmosphere that still wanders in the collective memory of the city. Here the Tirana of the novel becomes more intimate. The silent circuits of the boulevard appear, those endless walks where people seemed to move freely, while in truth they carried silence and care for every word on their shoulders. The morning gymnastics appear, not merely as physical exercise, but as a choreography of a society that sought to be the same in rhythm and in thought.
Through the pages of the book runs the construction of the Hotel Tirana over the traces of another time, the long lines for food pass by, not only as economic scarcity, but as a ritual that shaped the patience, disappointment and psychology of generations. There are many episodes and characters, quite interesting, that cannot be summarized in such a modest piece of writing.
One episode of particular significance is that of the student dormitories, a time in which I too was a dormitory student, which the book presents not only as places of residence, but as spaces where the ideas began to take shape that would later nourish political pluralism and the birth of the Albanian opposition.
And then comes the great turn. Tirana in the years after the fall of communism. A city that suddenly was left without a script. A city that demanded freedom, but still did not know how to live it. Chaos, energy, a thirst for wealth, great dreams and disappointments just as great. Against this backdrop appears the year 1997, perhaps one of the most dramatic chapters of our collective memory, with the fever of pyramid schemes, the figures of the fraudsters of the usury firms, the collapse of beliefs and a society that experienced both illusion and collapse at the same time.
In this overview, the book also pauses at the role of the media of that time, at the voices that tried to report events as they were happening, among them the newspaper “Koha Jonë”, as part of the turbulent public climate of those years. If I were to stop at some of the pages that stayed with me the longest, I would single out the way the end of the last century is shaped, where history is no longer told as a chronicle, but as the pulse of a city changing its skin. There is a rare narrative power in the way the author builds the revolt of Tirana’s dormitory students and the atmosphere that preceded the great changes. These are not simply students protesting. They are two worlds seeing each other face to face for the first time: on one side, those who had come from elsewhere, used to scarcity, to cramped rooms, to waiting, to survival, and to the desire to break through the wall; on the other, the non-dormitory students, closer to the rhythm of the city, with a different relationship to freedom, to fear and to the future.
Blushi does not put the characters on trial. He places them in history. And it is precisely there that literature is born. With long sentences, with unexpected turns, with comparisons that seem to arise naturally yet bear the stamp of a style entirely his own, he turns the protest into a human river in which idealism, anger, confusion and hope mingle. These are the pages where you feel that the author is not just telling you what happened, but drawing you inside the breath of the time.
But the panorama of 1997 seems even more striking to me. Here Tirana steps outside itself. The city is not only physically ruined; it seems to temporarily lose its memory. The kiosks do not appear as illegal structures, but as a parallel world sprouting on the asphalt, like mushrooms after rain, as the proclamation of an unrefined freedom that sought to occupy every possible space. And their strange, bold names, at times naive and at times grotesque, in Blushi’s text take on the value of anthropological documents of a time that was trying to invent itself without yet knowing what it wanted to become.
These are the pages where you understand that the author has not written only the history of Tirana. He has written its psychology. Because cities, like people, are not described only by what they built, but also by the way they went mad. And it is precisely here that the book closes with a special force. Because after four centuries of history, Tirana does not appear as a city that has found its answers, but as a city that continues to ask questions.
In closing, I do not know whether this book will spark as many debates as Blushi’s previous books. Perhaps it will. Because he has never chosen the calm path of writing. He has always preferred the question to the answer, provocation to comfort, and inquiry to reconciliation. But one thing I felt clearly while reading this book. This time he has not written only about the history of a city. He has written about time. About the way time builds us and how we, without realizing it, build our cities. He has taken a four-century-old city and given it human breath. He has entered archives, legends, memoirs, silence and madness, and from them has built a narrative that reads not like history, but like life. And that is no small thing.
I have the privilege of reading this work before it reaches the reader. I say with conviction that this is not just a book to be read; it is a book that will be discussed at length, will be contested, will be remembered and will return to people’s hands many years from now. Because in the end, each reader will find a piece of themselves within it.
Someone will recognize the street where they spent their childhood. Someone will encounter a story they had never heard. Someone a memory. Someone a loss. And someone will understand for the first time that cities are built not only with stones, but with people, with folly, with madness, with dreams and with time. I wish that this next pearl will have the fate it deserves. And above all, that it will find what every writer quietly seeks: not only readers, but people who, after closing the book, will look at their city with different eyes.
I wrote these impressions as a reader, with respect and gratitude for another truly interesting journey that Ben Blushi has gifted us.
To all the friends who love the book: this Monday, 2 November, at 18:00 at Hotel Plaza, this book will be promoted, and you can get it there.