1,001 Uses for an Albanian Bunker

DURRES, Albania -- The place Jonuz Kasnis and his family call home looks like an inverted concrete saucer with protruding metal loops of inscru-table function. Its front door is a narrow portal so low to the ground that even the younger children must duck to get in.


The sole window was not intended to take best advantage of the breathtaking view, but rather to accommodate the snout of an anti-tank gun.


Having despaired of the poverty and backwardness of their home town in northern Albania, the Kasnis have taken up residence in one of the ubiquitous defense bunkers that stud Albania's majestic landscape.


The 700,000 sheltered artillery emplacements -- dug into hillsides, shorelines and crossroads -- are unique to Albania and remain as monuments to the paranoia that consumed the late dictator Enver Hoxha during the 41 years he kept this European country in isolation.


Hoxha built the structures after he cut his nation's ties with both East and West. He wanted them to be able to withstand an invasion by forces of either the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the Warsaw Pact.


Now the bunkers are proving to be one of the most insurmountable legacies of the Stalinist era.


They are nearly indestructible and would cost a fortune to remove.


But the monuments to military madness are also inspiring ingenuity. Farmers use them for chicken coops. Neophyte businessmen have converted well-located bunkers into kiosks, burger bars, shoeshine stands, even discos. One large bunker near the Greek-populated southern village of Goranxi has been topped with an Orthodox cross and will soon take in the faithful.


Kasni, who has lived for nearly a year in his bunker on the eastern outskirts of Durres, a seaport on the Adriatic, shrugged off suggestions that his family of six was enduring undue hardship. "This is better than what we had in Peshkopi," the 45-year-old mechanic said of the crude mountain hut they had left behind. He also said his squatter's home compares favorably to much of the dilapidated housing in Albania's main cities.


Kasni has pirated electricity from the transmission lines that run along the nearby road, powering a huge television, a clock radio and a bare light bulb that hangs in his yurt-like home. Water is fetched from a creek less than 100 yards from the doorway. The contents of an outdoor privy are composted with garbage and leaves in a smaller bunker.


Government officials will not say so on the record, but they concede privately that looking the other way at such illegal conversions has eased a catastrophic housing crisis brought on by too many disillusioned rural people on the move.


The Defense Ministry built and has maintained the bunkers at a cost Albanian economists say would have financed the construction of an equivalent number of two-room apartments. Although the ministry issued an edict last year forbidding willful destruction of the "strategic defensive positions," government officials say they have no idea what to do with the bunkers. Excavating and extracting the millions of tons of concrete would be too expensive for a country as impoverished as Albania, officials acknowledge.


But while the government ponders options, Maura Schwartz, chief envoy to Albania of the American aid group Volunteers in Oversees Cooperative Assistance, has taken on the bunker burden with relish. In a campaign to compile "1,001 Uses for a Dead Bunker," Schwartz has dunned every Western diplomat, volunteer, missionary and potential investor for at least one idea before departure. Her idea bank covers an array of productive uses, from mushroom farms to marine breakwaters, crypts to camping shelters.


But even without such Western imput, Albanians have proved inventive: "A lot of people had their first sexual experience in a bunker," observed a 24-year-old Tirana woman. "We didn't have to wait for foreigners to suggest that."