What's it Like Living in Tirana?
The rising star of the Balkans is both quaint and overbearing
Tirana is a lovely, funky and very loud city.
Cafe Capital
For starters, every other building in the city is a cafe. There are more coffee houses per capita in Albania than anywhere else on the face of this planet.
This is largely because local coffee culture and money laundering.
Everyone inside these cafes is smoking, sipping a Turkish coffee for hours on end, gossiping and gesticulating wildly about everything from family to work to their latest travels. Outside, a second city of tangled cables, antennas and wires crisscross the sky and grow unhampered, feeding the growing population’s appetite for satellite television, internet and electricity.
As for the money laundering bit - Albanian businessmen who have made their fortunes outside the country need to clean their money by investing in something that slowly yet surely appreciates in value and requires little labor or supervision.
Real estate is always a good investment, and in Tirana, prices have boomed the past few years. All the drug money streaming into the city from beyond and within Albania has contributed to an affordability crisis in the capital that has seen rents double in the past couple of years. Most young people cannot afford to live anywhere central, forcing many to live at home with parents or family or squeeze into decrepit Communist-era buildings with open-air stairwells and no heating or insulation.
The investment that the money laundering pumps into the city is quickly turning it into the rising star of the Balkans. Compared to neighboring countries’ capitals, Tirana is absolutely booming.
While most of this money goes into buying and developing properties, much of it also finds its way into the almost endless supply of high-end, newly-renovated cafes serving cappuccinos for a dollar and a half (in the United States, such a venue would charge close to ten bucks for a coffee). These establishments serve the local populace well since they like to drink at least three or four coffees a day.
Thinking of moving to Tirana and want an expert’s help relocating? I recommend getting in touch with MagicTowns.al - they have a ton of resources on the best places in Albania to invest in, how healthcare looks in this country and what the cost of living is like.
Chaotic and Lively Streets
The population explosion has created significant traffic. Tirana is a lovely and quaint small city packed with too many people: everyone is leaving the countryside to live in the capital, where jobs and opportunities proliferate. Last year, Tirana was the only county in the country to register any growth; as of 2022, the capital is home to one in every three people in Albania.
Biking in this city is scary because nobody respects the traffic laws. This town was not built for nearly a million inhabitants, each with two cars. The commendable efforts by the municipality to develop bike lanes around town has helped alleviate some of the pressure, but getting around the city by anything other than foot is frightening as cars weave in and out of traffic erratically and young men in Maseratis and BMWs (again, drug money) race down the main boulevards of Blloku.
The next most popular businesses in Tirana are its hair salons, beauty clinics, dental offices and barber shops.
Oh, and don’t forget the money exchanges. They’re everywhere.
Walking around town, you’ll see quite quickly just how much Albanian women like to groom themselves and keep up appearances. Botox is extremely common in this corner of the Balkans, as are dental implants and hair plugs due to the procedures’ very low price tags (some people prefer to hop on an hour-and-a-half flight to Istanbul to get these procedures done). It’s quite common to see young women walking around with post-op styrofoam bandages on their noses.
The city lacks green oases. There’s just the Grand Park of Tirana, which is one of the best metropolitan parks I’ve ever visited. It’s massive and contains a gorgeous artificial lake. The park has running paths and bike lanes that wind through the woods, making you feel like you’ve left the concrete jungle behind.
But that’s it. If you don’t live near the park, you’re pretty much out of luck in terms of accessing nature. The municipality should recreate the success of the Grand Park on a smaller scale and provide more green spaces in the rest of the city, because it’s sorely needed and would help make life in the city a little less stressful.
The roads here are largely terrible - they are more pothole than gravel, though, in contrast with New York, where I used to live, major infrastructure projects get executed very quickly. The number of roads they’ve opened to connect the crisscross of highways in and out of Tirana with the rest of the country has rapidly increased. They’ve built two new highways to connect the infamous South of the country, with its paradisical beaches, to the rest of the country, easing congestion significantly and allowing people to bypass Llogara and Vlora.
Small, Quiet Escapes
I love the back alleys of Tirana - they’re a breath of fresh air away from the bustling and cantankerous main boulevards. It’s here that the tangle of illegal satellite television cables runs thickest and life slows down. Kids in courtyards tucked away in the backs of tall residential buildings ride bikes and kick around soccer balls. Old men sit down to clink dominos on tabletops, sipping Turkish coffee and spitting out sunflower seed shells.
The pastel palette of apartment buildings in the capital is unique and charming. Half the buildings are painted muted shades of green, pink, orange and red. The colors harken to the communist era and give you the sense that you’re in another century. Clotheslines and potted plants jut out from the balconies and keep watch over the bustling roads and alleys underneath: you never feel alone in Tirana because even if the street is empty, there’s always someone on a balcony above, ringing out wet clothes, smoking a cigarette or watering their plants.
I love it here. It’s energetic and weird and chaotic and very, very loud. Between the bars playing the same mix of Latin and top forty songs nonstop (they haven’t caught on to the acoustic cover playlist you’ll hear in a Starbucks), even at eight in the morning, and the never-ending drilling of new construction going up all over the city, Tirana is a high-volume metropolis.
Having lived here for so long, I forget what it’s like to live somewhere quiet; the moment I leave Tirana for a neighboring Balkan country, the quiet falls over me like a heavy, invisible cloak.
The Jarring Sight of Roma Beggars
One jarring thing for me, having moved here from New York, is the Roma beggars.
The Romani are an itinerant minority with roots in western India. They are one of the largest minorities in Europe and face a lot of challenges in Albania, not to mention the rest of the European continent.
In America, you’re used to seeing beggars on the streets of New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Chicago of all stripes and colors. Poverty and deprivation in the US do not discriminate between black, Latino, Asian and white people, and you’re just as likely to see a white person on the street or subway begging as you are a black person.
It’s an equal opportunity disaster.
In Albania, almost all beggars on the street are Romani. Sitting in the trendy and hip outdoor bars of Blloku, you will be regularly visited by barefoot Roma children with dirt on their faces wearing mismatched pajamas, palms outstretched, asking for “pak leke, te lutem.”
Poverty and deprivation are tragic regardless of the ethnicity of the individual experiencing them, but it strikes me as especially sad that in Albania, only one ethnic group represents almost the entire beggar population.
Why this is the case is up for debate - a lot of people attribute the Roma’s difficulties to their highly itinerant lifestyle and culture, which does not encourage integration with the rest of society. Others point to the history of discrimination and persecution this group has experienced in Europe to explain why they avoid assimilating into their host culture, as well as to ongoing discrimination today in employment, education and beyond.
(A wonderful Romani friend I made these past months has started a radio show in Albanian where she discusses these topics at length - I recommend tuning in to it.)
I think it’s the sight of the beggars at major intersections with their children hanging off their hips, holding a car squeegee, that always throws me off. Many Romani will beg at these intersections or offer window-cleaning services to cars stalled at the traffic light.
Despite the obviously unenviable conditions they find themselves in, these people are always smiling and laughing. They don’t seem miserable, though spending all your daytime hours at a busy intersection in the middle of Tirana sure would make most sane people lose their minds.
I guess they encapsulate the Albanian vibe perfectly - an eclectic mix of traditional and modern, euphoric and depressed, loud yet quiet, all on display, all the time.
A Big Small Town
Tirana feels like a very big small town - you are bound to run into people you know everywhere you go.
The city itself is quite small, especially if you hang out in its center where most of the attractions lie. It’s quite common for friends to run into each other on the streets of Blloku or in the Grand Park and to stop and chat for a few minutes or even grab an impromptu coffee (there’s always a reason to get coffee in Albania).
The municipality puts on a lot of free events, too, that make meeting people quite easy. You will rarely be invited into an Albanian’s home in Tirana because the culture generally encourages getting together at restaurants, cafes or events. People here don’t host all that often.
Because it’s such a tiny country with fewer than three million inhabitants, Albanians feel quite connected to each other. People are careful with their appearances and behavior in public because everyone knows everyone (this is also related to the Communist-era relic of paranoia I wrote about in a previous post).
This is in stark contrast with a city like New York, where you instantly feel like one of eight million strangers in a megalopolis full of immigrants from within and outside the US. Everyone is from all corners of the country and planet, and nobody knows each other super well, so people aren’t generally warm or cordial.
Tirana is like most major cities - it has its good and bad sides. Vibrant nightlife, high-quality yet affordable restaurants and a constant stream of young college graduates make this city a lively and energetic place to live. The influence of its communist past isn’t lost upon the capital of Albania, and its chic and distinctly European vibe gives the city an endearing vibe.
If you haven’t visited yet, I highly recommend it! It’s different from other European capitals and has lots to offer.
As for living here? It’s amazing, but not for the faint of heart.
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Also you forgot that the city doesn't have a sewage system, and all the raw sewage gets poured in the city river, to later end up in the Adriatic sea - think about this next time you go to swim in Durres.
(No fish, frog, or bacteria survives this)
And Albanians have had plenty of help to fix this problem. Tha last opportunity that was squandered was a 100M$ loan from Japan to build a much needed water treatment facility, which of course all of this was stolen, with the case now in Arbitrage in London.
During the last 10 years 500k people have left Albania, but at least we have good coffee ain't we!
Curious to know how did you come up with the conclusion that coffee shops are a result of money laundering? And enough with the botox! It’s not an Albanian invention, nor the top feature of Tirana’s citizens.