For four decades, he ruled Albania with an iron fist, imposing Stalinist principles and leading the western Balkan state into isolation and poverty.
So the idea that his former home in central Tirana might one day be opened up to all and sundry would have horrified Enver Hoxha, the paranoid, reclusive communist dictator who died in 1985 – which is precisely the point.
Hitherto a sprawling, three-storey monument to totalitarianism, Villa 31, where Hoxha lived with his family from 1970, is to become a symbol of freedom and transformation.
The move will honour the pledge of Edi Rama, the Albanian prime minister, to turn the 43,000 sq ft property into ‘something that would make Enver Hoxha roll in his grave’.
Since January, the house that Hoxha built has welcomed visiting artists, who have been at liberty to ‘express everything, from fury to anger, to betrayal, to ambivalence, to the absurd,’ according to Stanislava Pinchuk, a 37-year-old artist from Ukraine.
But what Pinchuk describes as the despot’s ‘worst nightmare’ does not end there. In April, the doors of Villa 31 will be flung open to the public, with tourists invited to view work created by the artists and explore the labyrinthine home.
As Hoxha once put it in a New Year’s address to the country: ‘This year will be harder than last year; however, it will be easier than next year.’
The residence includes a basement swimming pool and an escape tunnel leading to an underground bunker, designed to offer shelter in the event of an attack – an unlikely scenario, given the ample security presence that patrolled the district during Hoxha’s occupancy.
Villa 31, once home to the brutal communist dictator Enver Hoxha and his family, is situated in the thriving Blloku district of the Albanian capital Tirana. It currently houses visiting artists
Enver Hoxha ruled Albania with an iron fist after taking power at the end of the second world war. Hoxha, who became paranoid and reclusive during his years power, died aged 76 in 1985
From April, the doors of Villa 31 will be flung open to the public, with tourists invited to view work created by visiting artists and explore the labyrinthine property
For Pinchuk, the chain-smoking dictator’s library has been a particular point of fascination. A noted bibliophile, Hoxha had a fondness for detective novels and was particularly partial to the works of Agatha Christie.
There are also books about sex, which ordinary Albanians were banned from reading at the time.
More predictably, Hoxha enjoyed tomes by the likes of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin – testament, said Pinchuk, to ‘an ideology refusing to die’.
He also read about the French Revolution as well as student protests in the former Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the fifties and sixties.
In recent years, as the Blloku district of the Albanian capital in which the villa lies has acquired an increasingly contemporary edge, the area’s trendy bars and clubs have sharpened focus around the question of what to do about Hoxha’s former home.
While Albania remains among Europe’s poorest countries, it has come a long way since the Hoxha years, welcoming about 10 million tourists annually.
Some believe Villa 31 should have been left untouched, a grim reminder of a repressive regime that saw an estimated 100,000 people imprisoned, sent to internment camps or executed. Others feel that would have risked the residence becoming a monument to a past most Albanians would rather forget.
An artist is seen walking through a room of the villa of the former Albanian communist dictator
The flag of Albania, with its distinctive black double-headed eagle, is seen alongside an artwork at Villa 31, where the Hoxha family lived until his regime was toppled in 1990
‘It would have been better if it had remained for generations so that our children and grandchildren could learn from it,’ said Xhevdet Lani, a taxi driver and long-standing Tirana resident.
For Lani, the villa is ‘historic evidence of what the dictatorship once was’.
But for Nita Deda, manager of Art Explora, a French-based foundation that spearheaded the building’s transformation, the arrangement reflects ‘the power of art to deal with a painful past’.
There is no right answer.
But as the house where Hoxha once watched video footage of his political opponents being tortured and slain becomes the scene of poetry readings, experimental theatre and film screenings, many may feel a dark chapter from the country’s past has been laid to rest once and for all.
