Emigration

Communism fell between 1990 and 1991, and what followed was not a smooth transition but a decade of leaving and collapse. On 8 August 1991 the freighter Vlora reached Bari carrying some twenty thousand people. In 1997 the pyramid schemes that had swallowed much of the country's savings collapsed, the state lost control of its own armouries, and Albania came close to civil war. In 1999 it took in refugees from Kosovo in numbers that would have strained a far larger country.

Part of Albania

23 moments in this segment.

1. 1990 - Eighty minutes in Albania, 1990. An eighty-three-minute amateur record of Albania in 1990, the last full year of communist rule. The uploader lists northern Gheg districts - Shkodra, Malesia, Dukagjini, Mirdita - but leaves the footage without commentary.
2. 1990 - A BBC crew reports from Albania. British television reporting from inside Albania in 1990, the year the last Stalinist state in Europe started to come apart. Foreign crews had been admitted only rarely in the four decades before.
3. 1991 - Albanian soldier with an AK-47, 1991. An Albanian soldier holding an AK-47 around 1991, the year one-party rule ended. Within months army depots across the country would be looted.
4. 1991 - Amateur footage from Albania, 1991. Home-video material filmed in Albania in 1991, the year the one-party state gave way. The uploader supplies no detail beyond the place and the year, and the footage is filed on that basis alone.
5. 1991-08-08 - The Vlora reaches Bari. On 8 August 1991 the freighter Vlora docked at Bari with roughly twenty thousand Albanians aboard, taken on at Durres. The pictures of the overloaded ship became the defining image of the Albanian exodus in Italy.
6. 1991-08-08 - The Vlora docks at Bari. The cargo ship Vlora reaches the Italian port of Bari on 8 August 1991 with some twenty thousand Albanians aboard, having been boarded en masse at Durrës. It was the single largest arrival of the post-communist exodus.
7. 1995 - Tirana railway station in 1995. The station in 1995, in the years when the trains were free-for-all and the rails themselves were being stripped for scrap. The collapse of the railway is one of the plainest measures of what the 1990s did to Albanian infrastructure.
8. 1997-02-05 - Savers besiege the banks in Tirana. Thousands of Albanians ruined by the pyramid schemes crowd banks in Tirana for partial refunds in February 1997. The losses consumed much of the country's savings and pushed Albania towards armed revolt.
9. 1997-02-14 - Crowds break police lines in Fier. On 14 February 1997 several thousand demonstrators forced their way past police in the southern town of Fier and marched on the government offices. It was one of the first mass confrontations after the pyramid schemes began to fail.
10. 1997-02-20 - VEFA offers to repay its smallest savers. On 20 February 1997 VEFA Holding, one of Albania's largest companies, said it would return money to depositors who had put in less than five thousand dollars. Crowds gathered at its offices as the collapse widened.
11. 1997-02-26 - Parents and children demand their savings. Families ruined by the fraudulent investment schemes took to the streets on 26 February 1997 to demand the resignation of Sali Berisha's government. Children marched alongside their parents as the protests spread from town to town.
12. 1997 - A flotilla leaves for Italy, 1997. About 1,300 Albanians put to sea for southern Italy in overloaded boats during the 1997 collapse, one wave of an exodus that kept growing that spring. The south of the country was by then outside government control.
13. 1999-05-20 - Albanian tanks near the Kosovo border. Albanian army tanks deploy near the Kosovo border on 20 May 1999, after cross-border shelling by Yugoslav forces. The war next door pulled the Albanian state into a crisis it had barely the means to manage.
14. 1999 - Kofi Annan at Kukës during the Kosovo crisis. The United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan visits Kukës in 1999. The small border town took in hundreds of thousands of people expelled from Kosovo that spring, several times its own population.
15. 1999 - Refugee camp on the old mine workings at Kukës. Tents laid out on the ground of a disused mine near Kukës in the summer of 1999. Albania, then the poorest country in Europe, took in around half a million Kosovar refugees in a matter of weeks.
16. 1999 - A Super Puma flying for the refugee agency at Kukës. A Swiss air force Super Puma in service with the United Nations refugee agency stands at Kukës in the summer of 1999. Air bridges carried supplies into a region with almost no usable roads.
17. 1999 - Diesel locomotives at Pogradec. Locomotives of the Albanian railway standing at Pogradec in 1999. The network, built largely by volunteer youth brigades after 1947, decayed quickly once the state that ran it collapsed.
18. 1999 - Stripped locomotives near Pogradec. Vandalised and abandoned engines of the Albanian railway near Pogradec in 1999. In the disorder of the decade after 1990, and especially after the 1997 collapse, state property was stripped for scrap across the country.
19. 2011-08-08 - The Vlora's captain remembers Bari. An Italian regional bulletin marking twenty years since the landing, built around the recollections of Halim Milaqi, who commanded the Vlora. He recounts the crossing from Durrës with the ship overwhelmed.
20. 2019-11-27 - Aid unloaded at Durrës after the earthquake. Relief material is unloaded at Durrës on 27 November 2019, a day after the strongest earthquake to hit Albania in decades killed fifty-one people and left thousands homeless along the central coast.
21. 2021-09-29 - Lea Ypi on the year everything changed. The writer Lea Ypi describes coming of age in Albania as the last Stalinist state in Europe fell apart, the subject of her memoir 'Free'. She speaks from inside a family whose own history the change reopened.
22. 2023-01-26 - Bari, August 1991, remembered. An Italian documentary on the ship Vlora and the arrival of the Albanians at Bari, carrying the account of Eva Meksi, who made the crossing. It sets the exodus against the collapse of the regime that produced it.
23. 2025-02-19 - The Duam bukë memorial in Kavajë. A memorial in Kavajë carrying the words Duam bukë, we want bread. Kavajë was one of the towns where public protest against the old order became open at the start of the 1990s.