Tirana
— — a capital that learned to paint its own buildings.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Albania, set on a small plain with Mount Dajti rising to the east and the Adriatic an hour west. Skanderbeg Square holds the centre, ringed by the Et'hem Bey Mosque, the clock tower, and the national museum. After 1990 the city did something almost no other capital did: it painted the grey block facades in bright geometric colour, a project the mayor at the time turned into city policy. The cable car runs to the ridge; the espresso is good. from the studio
Tirana, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tirana is the capital and largest city of Albania, founded in 1614 by the Ottoman general Sulejman Pasha Bargjini and made the country's capital in 1920. It sits at roughly 110 metres above sea level on a small inland plain, with Mount Dajti rising to 1,613 metres along the eastern edge and the Adriatic coast about 35 kilometres to the west. The city covers about 41 square kilometres in its urban core and holds a metropolitan population near 900,000. Skanderbeg Square anchors the centre, named for the 15th-century national hero Gjergj Kastrioti.
Starting in 2000, then-mayor Edi Rama, a former painter, ordered the grey communist-era apartment blocks along the main boulevards repainted in bright geometric patterns. The project became known as the Tirana facades programme and gave the city an identity that travel writers had been struggling to name. It also won Rama the World Mayor Prize in 2004. The colour has faded and been refreshed in waves since, but the principle has held: the centre reads as a city that decided to look like something rather than wait to be told what it was.
Skanderbeg Square was pedestrianised in 2017 to a design by the Belgian firm 51N4E, with stone from every region of Albania set into the new surface. From the eastern edge of the city the Dajti Ekspres cable car climbs about 4.2 kilometres to the ridge of Mount Dajti National Park in roughly 15 minutes. Bunk'Art 1, a Cold War bunker built for the regime of Enver Hoxha and opened to visitors in 2014, gives the clearest read of the closed years. April through June and September into October are the easiest months; summer turns hot and dry.