Escape to myself

This was a haunting place. Built by King Zog, short–lived king of Albania in the 30s, as a place for receptions and as a summer retreat he only enjoyed it for a year before he was deposed. Walking through the derelict rooms echoes of the interwar years whispered of cocktails, jazz, parties, intrigue and politics. This is at once one of the saddest places and one of the most beautiful. Set high on the cliffs overlooking the bluest of seas and wooded hills and pines once pristine and now marred by uncontrolled development one’s imagination conjures up the past. Marble staircases and floors, once stately reception rooms, terraces and bathrooms now slowly decaying and left open to the elements. It is a building redolent of a past not so long gone.

Used a little by the Communist regime after the war it hosted Khrushchev and Jimmy Carter but was vandalised during the 1997 unrest. Now it stands as a lonely reminder.

Three euros gives access to this monument to insubstantiality… marble covers reinforced concrete walls, plaster covered wood the falling ceilings; all is surface, nothing is as it seems. A small and somewhat pathetic testament to hubris and political instability and to our desires and dreams; a metaphor. I love this place. The aesthetics of entropy.