Trying to paint over the cracks

'We are a people without hope," said the taxi driver, fixing his eyes on the road that leads from Mother Teresa International Airport. The tarmac ended abruptly, and he buckled his seatbelt. That alone was enough to worry me. My first impressions of Albania were not encouraging.

Silhouetted by the setting sun, half-finished buildings littered the approaches to Tirana. I had time to study them, for we were weaving slowly in and out of a lunar landscape of potholes, tracking what seemed an infinite procession of Mercedes. As we passed through the shanty-like outskirts of the city, the denim-clad men on each corner raised their heads listlessly to scan the windows of the car. I looked away from them. The hotel minibar was stocked with strong cigarettes. I wasn't surprised.

By daylight, Tirana looked much less menacing, if no less dislocated in time. I set off down its main boulevard, built under Italian influence in the 1930s and now showing its age. Most of its cobbles were missing, and grass was growing through the concrete forecourt of the National Art Academy. A swirl of dust and pine needles blotted out the view of the mountains ringing the city, and people bent low, clutching their hats. Women carried parasols, protection against the fierce sun. None of the menfolk, I noticed, was wearing a tie or even a jacket. Communism may have gone, but egalitarian instincts are taking their time to die.

At the top of the street lay Skanderbeg Square, Tirana's focal point, a giant roundabout named for the 15th-century hero who had briefly stemmed the Ottomans' advance. The only surviving relic of the four centuries that the city was under Muslim rule is the mosque in a corner of the square. The attendant dozed as I looked at the frescoes inside, which show Tirana as a city of domes and minarets, all swept aside by the Stalinist architecture favoured by Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania from 1945 until his death in 1985. His mausoleum, a cross between an Aztec pyramid and a spaceship, squats nearby. Almost the only other legacy of Ottoman dominance that I came across was when a man sardonically shouted the Turkish for "thank you" as a cigarette flew out of a window above our heads.