Postbllok Memorial

The Postbllok Memorial is an artwork by the artist Ardian Isufi and writer Fatos Lubonja. The memorial was inaugurated on March 26, 2013.

Postbllok was designed to be a memorial to the atrocities of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, and it is made up of three separate pieces. The first part of the memorial is a concrete military bunker, one of many that covered Albania during the Cold War. It serves as a symbol of the dictatorship that until relatively recently, held Albania in its grip. 

The second element is a section of the Berlin Wall. This is meant to symbolize Albania’s isolation during the period of the dictatorship.  The section of the wall was a gift from the government of Berlin to Tirana. 

The final part of the memorial is a set of concrete girders taken from Spaç Prison, where, for a period Lubonja was imprisoned.  The girders stand lined up in a row, as they would have been in the halls of the prison.

The memorial stands in the neighborhood where the nomenklatura, Soviet administrators and bureaucrats, built their dachas. Specifically, the memorial stands in what was once the garden of the dacha of Mehmet Shehu, who served as the Prime Minister of Albania from 1954 to 1981.