Tag: Lapidar

Today’s post is a scan of Kujtim Buza and Kleanth Dedi’s  Përmendore të Heroizmit Shqiptar [Monuments to Albanian Heroism], (Tirana: Shtëpia Qëndrore e Ushtrisë Popullore, 1973), with photographs credited to Dhimitraq Trebicka. This publication presents documentation of monuments constructed in Albania through the early 1970s. Most of the monuments and memorials appearing in the book were constructed during the socialist era, although some (by sculptor Odhise Paskali) date from earlier periods.

Like Mircea Grozdea’s Arta monumentală în România socialistă [1973], Veneta Ivanova’s Българска монументална скулптура: развитие и проблеми [1978), and Juraj Baldani’s Revolucionarno Kiparstvo [1977], Përmendore të Heroizmit Shqiptar represents a socialist nation’s viewpoint on the history and development of its own monumentality. Published in 1973, the book comes precisely at the historical moment when socialist Albania turned decidedly against ‘foreign influences’ in art and culture (after a period of openness and in some cases experimentation in the late 1960s, a period during which the country had also aligned itself ideologically with China’s cultural revolution). In the 1960s and 70s in particular, a huge number of monuments were constructed in Albania (in many cases to correspond to the celebration of the 25th anniversary of liberation from fascist forces, in 1969).

These memorials included both lapidars, architectural and sometimes sculptural ensembles that were dedicated to the martyrs and heroes of the National Liberation War (the Second World War), as well as traditional figurative sculptures commemorating Skanderbeg, independence from the Ottoman Empire, the War of 1920, and so on. Monuments existing prior to the socialist period, especially those commissioned by the regime of the Albanian interwar leader King Ahmet Zogu, are absent–with the exception of works created by Odhise Paskali, whose messages were considered to be purely nationalist, and therefore ideologically amenable to the project of socialist nation-building in Albania. (The opening text by artist and critic Kujtim Buza and historian Kleanth Dedi discuss the memorial landscape prior to the rise of socialism as a blank slate, primarily attributing the rise of materialized history in Albania to the socialist regime. This is of course inaccurate–several memorials from prior regimes were destroyed by the socialists for ideological reasons.)

*Unfortunately, the version of the book that I scanned was a misprint and included a section of repeated pages. Thus, some images (for example, of the martyr’s cemeteries in Librazhd and Fier) only appear as thumbnails in the back of the book, but not as full-sized photographs. At some point, I will scan these pages from another copy of the book, but for now they are not present.