The Pillars of Hercules

A wolf gnawed a bone in a small cell. Three eagles flopped in another cage, so small that it was impossible for them to spread their wings—one of them hobbled. A filthy crane, four sweating bear cubs, and worst of all a lioness, demented by captivity, pacing beside the bars, with still enough wit to flinch when an Albanian worker tossed twigs at her. Her mate, cowed by the twig-throwing, retreated to the back wall of the cage.

“Why are you doing that, you shithead?” I said to the Albanian, and made gestures.

He grinned at me and muttered in his own language. Throwing things at the animals was apparently one of the pastimes here. Among old bones and lion droppings and slime there was the other stuff that Albanians had flung through the bars—more twigs, balled-up paper, stones, a black cap.

But seeing this zoo was a way of understanding how the Albanians lived, in tiny apartments, eating bad food and not enough of it, putting up with water shortages and power cuts, tormenting each other, ignoring the filth in the streets. It was almost certainly the way their prisoners were treated, and these zoo animals were just another species of prisoner.

• • •

If I had abused that bullying man at the zoo in Italian he might have understood me. It was true that Italian was the second language here. I found an Italian-speaking taxi driver, Ali, bargained a little and went back to Durrës in his fairly new Lancia.

“Where did you buy this car?”

“Down the coast. The place has no name.”

“So was this car stolen?”

“Probably. But not here. Italy maybe.”

The bunkers by the roadside and on every hill did not look less strange, even days later. Ali said one of them was his—he had forgotten which one.

Past the ruined trees, the broken road, the cracked tenements, the locked railway station: I had fled from these on the old bus. The beach at Durrës was the nastiest I had seen in the Mediterranean. It was bouldery and black, littered with oily flotsam, broken glass and greasy plastic. This was the sort of beach that needed a great overwhelming tide to sweep it and scour its sand. Such a tide did not exist in this sea.

Its filth did not deter Albanians from swimming and sunning themselves there. Pale, in their underwear, they had the look of people who had been forced to strip and undergo a cruel initiation.

Ancient Roman columns stood on the beach—in ancient times this was where the Via Egnatia picked up after it left Bari, one of the great spokes of the Roman road system. It was the remains of a temple, left to decay. Farther on, a war memorial to the Albanian dead—a twenty-foot-high bronze soldier charging off his plinth and underneath it, spray-painted in red on the marble, Nirvana and Guns n Roses and Fuck You.

The construction of the memorial—the way the slabs were set up, the marble blocks a certain height and spaced just so—made it serve a dual function as war memorial and toilet. It had been fouled; it stank. This whole shore under the headland of the former palace of King Zog was a horror.

Ali said, “Want to see the amphitheater?”

We drove into a dead end, and there among the houses of the slum was a Roman ruin. The slum was part of it, though the houses looked much frailer than the Roman arches.

An Albanian watchman, angling for a tip, began chattering in Italian.

“This is where the rich people came in on their horses,” he said, showing me a cavernous entry way. “The poor people came in through that little door up there.”

The slum dwellers had simply encroached upon it in a distinctly Mediterranean manner, creeping up to it and snatching the marble slabs and the old Roman bricks and using these ancient building materials for their hovels.

“This was big enough for fifteen thousand people,” the watchman said. “They had shows—animals, lions, tigers and gladiators. Look, the original stone, these steps, this passageway went all the way around the perimeter, where you see these houses.”

“The people used the stone for their houses,” I said.

“But they didn’t break it. An earthquake did that,” he said. “There were two earthquakes. In the first one it was destroyed. People took the stone to put in their houses. Come, I will show you the chapels.”

There were two Byzantine chapels in the lower passageway. There had been catacombs, there were mosaics of broken but still-recognizable portraits of saints. The watchman knew them: St. Sofia, St. Irene, St. Stephen, some angels. “This was used for baptisms and funerals.”

“It’s too bad so much of it is buried,” I said.

“We only found it a little while ago.”

“This Roman amphitheater? You didn’t know it was here?”

“No. Like I said, it was buried in an earthquake. Then one day in 1966 a man’s fig tree died. He dug it up, to plant another, and in the hole he found this wall—these stairs.” He showed me the marble staircase. “He dug further and when he found more stairs he reported it to the archaeological department. And they saw that this whole slope was an amphitheater.”