Winners of the "Ask Your Grandparents 2" competition visit sites of memory in Albania
1st Day, 21 March 2018
"Drita e Dijes" High School Visits "House of Leaves" and "BunkArt2" in Tirana
The first day of the study trip began with a visit to the "House of Leaves" and "BunkArt2" Museums in Tirana. Young adults from "Drita e Dijes" high school in Berat visited these places for first time and expressed that this visit was important as both museums provided an important approach to viewing the past.
2nd Day, 22 March 2018
Visit at the Former Prison of Spaç and Sites of Memory in Shkodra
During the second day, students visited sites of memory in northern Albania: the former prison of Spaç and Shkodra. 25 winners of the second edition of "Ask Your Granparents 2" representing 6 different high schools from Tirana, Vora, Durres, Elbasan & Berat, had the chance to talk with Zenel Drangu, a contemporary witness and former prisoner from Spac prison, when they visited Spac. Drangu told the young people that their every move in the prison had been monitored so that the guards could justify their violence.
"We were 50–54 men in a cell. Hygiene was difficult to maintain while malnourishment and maltreatment were the norm of the prison command whenever we failed to extract the required quantity of copper."
After Spaç, the study visit took the winners of the competition to sites of memory in Shkodra, where Eltjana Shkreli told them more about the city's communist past.
3rd Day, 23 March 2018
Visit to Marubi Museum and Site of Witness and Memory Museum in Shkodra
On the third day of the study visit, students visited the National Museum of Photography "Marubi". The young people had the chance to learn about some of Albania's most famous and earliest photographers.
After the Marubi Museum, the study visit continued to the Site of Witness and Memory. Pjerin Mirdita guided students through the museum, explaining to them that the building had been built in 1930 as a college for the Franciscan fathers. After the communist regime came to power in 1945, the building served as a branch of the Interior Ministry. This visit gave young people a better understanding of the true dimensions of the communist regime.
4th Day, 24 March 2018
Visit to Musine Kokalari's House in Gjirokastra and to the Internment and Deportation Memorial in Lushnja
The fourth day students visited the city of Gjirokastra in southern Albania The high school winners of the second "Pyet Gjyshërit" competition had never visited Gjirokastra before and IDMC provided an educational tour for them. First, the tour began with a visit to the house of Musine Kokalari. Arjeta told the history of the first female Albanian author who had founded the Social-Democrat Party and had been faced with the most inhuman Communist persecution. "She didn't want the war, the war of the classes. For this, to promote an ideal of coexistence of all classes, together with another group of intellectuals, she formed the Social-Democrat Party," Arjeta said as she told us later about the internment and the life of Musine Kokalari in Rreshen, where she lived alone, isolated and bound to report in the branch 3 times a week.
After the visit to the house of Musine Kokalari, students visited the Ethnographic Museum, another popular destination where you can see not only tradition but also how families of Gjirokastra lived. After the Ethnographic Museum, students visited the house of Ismail Kadare, which was reconstructed in 2016. After the visit to Kadare's house, students had the possibility to see Gjirokastra and to stop in Lushnje on the way back.
In Lushnja students stopped at the National Memorial of Internment and Deportations 1954–1991, dedicated to former persecuted. The zone of Lushnja was one of the locations of internment camps from the period of 1954-1991, where around 32 thousand people suffered the region's persecution. With this visit the group of high school students were acquainted with how far Hoxha's terror had extended, without provincial distinctions, from Shkodra in the north to Gjirokastra in the south.