Lana describes Tirana in its most important part. In the first article of this series, it is shown how it turned into a septic tank before everyone's eyes.
Author: Fjori Sinoruka, Joana Spaho
"This is not the stream. This is a sewer, giriz, in the middle of the country."
Luigi da Vivo had taken home from Dinamo Stadium and expected to stay in Tirana for a long time. It was easy to set up. People spoke his language and in the neighborhood there was a Conad, the supermarket that only an Italian could say something to. But this was a wonderland. It seemed to him that from here, the one who didn't understand would babble endlessly and the knowledgeable one would lower his head. The luxury cars, Porsches, Lamborghinis of 'I told you so' that he found here he had not seen in his whole life in Bari, where he came from. A little way out of the center, from Block Xanem, and the country was transformed like those villages in the south of the Apennines that were trampled in 1980 after an earthquake that had left a quarter of a million people on the streets. The Albanians, how much they knew how to do for each other at the table, and how easily they took God's work, with such fury they could set everything on fire for politics.
And Lana, the stream that ran through the center of the city, whose escarpments or steep walls have been green for fifteen years, was "una fognatura in cielo aperto. "
Lana, symbol of bad governance
The way we behaved with Lana can be the best example of what we did with our state since it was created in 1912, or exactly, since nine years later we gave Tirana as the capital. Any intervention in that river bed, which he either half-heartedly or half-heartedly tried to fix, brought out bigger and more thoughtless problems, and whatever he did in it would stink.
The direction of the bed in the channel orphaned the Tabake Bridge on the road to Elbasan. The concreting has turned that stream, as seen by state affairs in public perception, into a cesspool in the middle of the city. The reasons why the city used that watercourse earlier—Lana was where the tanners used to wash their skins and cast off the tannin; where Muslim women washed their clothes with ash water; that pool of dirty water in a Roma camp with tin and thatch cabins; it flowed somewhere from today's School of Ballet, where Qamil Shtiza was waiting with couples between his legs and with one eye asleep under the hood of his chin for some wild rabbit to dance in front of his eyes; or that pond with a diameter of seven meters in front of the widow at Bërryli, where toads bathed in the summer and caught some fish—all those reasons no longer exist. That concrete bed just parades the sewage of the greater part of Tirana in front of everyone's indifferent eyes.
There is no longer anything alive in that river, except some coleoptera—dragonflies, mosquitoes, and something that takes wings like those—says Aleko Miho, a biologist at the University of Tirana who studied it ten years ago. There is also a density of faecal coliforms, bacteria that exit the human intestines through the excreta system. They partly explain the stench in the middle of the city.
"The strange thing is," says Dritan Bratko, who has done the hydrology of the area for the city's regulatory plan, "if the sewage would not be poured into Lana"—that is, if the galezhants of half the city were not emptied from the street of Kavaja to the edge of the hills of the Lake; if the waters of shampoos to correct evening odors and of soaps of clothes and hands were not mixed with those of the traces of yahns and the vapors of pilaf with gravy on the plates, with the dregs of barley fermented for beer... and not there was rain—"that river would run out of water." Now that Albania has been taking matters into its own hands for over a century, if Tirana didn't pump that filth into the main artery of the city, Lana would be without water during the summer.
Where the stream starts
Lana is one of the four water lines that go down to the plain after collecting the rain from the maquis thickets on the western side of Dajti to the plain where Tirana lies. Two of them, Tërkuza and Šëmria, are used for drinking water. Lana and the river of Tirana are used for sewage.
It starts its 24-kilometer course somewhere among the bushes at the quarry in Dajt and cuts a gully through the bushes to the driveway. There, in a cafe on the right side of the road, fifty-five-year-old Refat Qordja admits that he can't keep up with the 300,000 lek a month he receives as a dispatcher and his grown-up son at home. The roof of the cafe is concrete with bars raised upwards to once connect a second floor. Beside her, a shed where chickens cluck on the ground and a fig tree shades a tent with yellow cellophane on which is written Wash. From the left of the street comes the din of swimming pool chlorine and the muffled boom of loudspeakers to keep her patrons energized—this is the current administrator of Lanabregas, now the city's eastern suburbs, private initiative for youth entertainment. In the tunnel below the asphalt, the waters have collected cellophane bags, bottles of car oil, glistening wrappers of mud-stained industrial Greek croissants. Where the streams come from, nobody goes now in the summer. "It's full of snakes there," says Genc Haxhialiu, a seventy-two-year-old who maintains the village villa of an Albanian diplomat nearby.
The driveway, then, takes an arc from the north creating a balcony from which one can see the multitude of town houses across two gentle hills, between which the stream meanders to reach the site of the former auto tractor plant. That's where the human hand starts to get really brutal.
1920 - Tirana becomes the capital 30s - The bed of Lana is concreted from Rruga e Elbasani to today's Boulevard Dëshmorët e Kombit. 1955 – Concreting of the rest of Lana, along the Ring Road, begins. From Bërryli to the bend of Vasil Shanto. Sewage drains into it. The escarpments, steep walls from its bed, turn green. 80s – The first ideas are put forward to add water to Lana during the summer from other water sources in Dajt. 1994 – In a competition of ideas for the management of Lana, it is suggested either to cover it, or to transfer the sewage to an underground bed. 1995-2000 – The cliffs of Lana are filled with buildings of commercial activities. 1996 – Recorded episodes of poliomyelitis are thought to have their source from dirt in the river water.
Why do we need a river?
Cities use rivers for transportation, to irrigate land, and to wash away garbage. But the big problem in the west started when the population began to increase more than the water could clean, and it was plague or typhus that forced big cities like London, Paris or New York to build sewers. "Even today, the most expensive undertaking in Paris is that of maintaining the sewers along the Seine," says Bratko. The small rivers in the cities were closed to pass the sewage underground, as with Paris, Athens or Pristina.
In the Balkans, the cities that preserved the rivers were important, mostly flat and navigable: you don't have to put a concrete slab over the Cem in Podgorica, the Vardar in Skopje, the Sava in Belgrade or Zagreb, or the Danube in Bucharest.
But Lana itself had never been more than a capricious stream that rushed down the mountain when it rained but almost disappeared in the summer. "It turned into the central river by chance," says Gjergji Papavasili, who has participated in several city planning projects from the eighties until now. "It turned into a transportation corridor and a decorative element even though it didn't have the elements for one." It was a stream which could provide work for tanners in a town of 15,000 inhabitants, but could not handle a town whose population multiplied in less than a century.
Until the thirties, the water line twisted through the bush, a few sections of it used by the guilds. Zogu made the first attempt at planning, the first concrete bed in what is today between Elbasan street and Dëshmorët e Kombit Boulevard, under the influence of Italian architecture. In the fifties it was added to the Ring. In 2000, the concrete bed was extended to the Arrow Palace, and then the Lana turns into a natural bed until it joins the Tirana River a few kilometers further, in Laknas across the Durres highway to the west.
"One always thinks about how Tirana was deformed by communism and transition," says Elton Koritari, the architect from Tirana who was responsible for the Albanian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2017. "The first deformation of Tirana was started by the Italians."
An Ottoman city, like the medieval ones of old, develops in pockets and patches of neighborhoods, with winding streets that fit the terrain. But the nineteenth century brought to the West boulevards and straight streets within cities, where carriages, cars and trams could move quickly. In Albania, this came mainly through Italian fascism.
For example, the city was relatively the same distance from Lana and from the river of Tirana, which has more water and eventually collects Lana, but in the last century, Tirana developed only from the south, in the direction of Lana and beyond it. . With that expansion, first with the neighborhoods along the boulevard, then under the hills of the Lake with what in the sixties was called the New Tirana, the sewage was thrown straight into the river, first through it, then by sewage, and the city began to smell evil in his heart.
flood
While the city continued to be built, the concreting of the Lana bed, which was widened in the 50s and 60s, brought another problem. When there was water, the river had nowhere to go. In autumn, a torrential rain in Dajt brings all the water to the center within three hours, says Bratko, the hydrological engineer. The waters rise above the road level. Before the flood, the ground floors of Shallvareve and Lana are the classic example of flooding in the city for students of geology at the university in Tirana. The direction of the roads and the constructions on them narrowed the river bed so much in the west of the city, in the area of the Technological School or the palace with arrows, where the river passes under the Kavaja Street, turning it into a faucet that cannot withstand the pressure of the hose of water.
It was not known what solution would be given to him, except for electoral slogans (Lana's utopia in presentations with three-dimensional projections were distributed in electoral campaigns six years ago.) All have problems of polluted water. Zagreb had built a treatment plant—with many doubts about it abuses in funds—only in the 2000s. Belgrade doesn't have one yet, but it could need six. Podgorica is doing it with one credit from the German Bank for Reconstruction.
For Lana once, for example, it was proposed to close the bed with dirty water, and to take water from the reservoirs under Dajt for the dry months of the year, and this was a free version, nothing but 'socialist'. A 'democratic' version was also proposed, much more expensive, to cover it almost completely, and turn it into a big boulevard. In 1994, when this idea was put into circulation, the municipality was owned by the Democrats, this project won the competition, but it was unfeasible as it cost tens of millions of dollars, says Fisnik Kruja, one of the engineers who competed. This also coincided with the period of construction of restaurants and bars and with the plague that broke out in a localized manner in it.
"Getting the water somewhere would solve the river problem," says Bratko. This idea has been mentioned since the eighties. "But I have the idea that it will not be accepted because they think it is expensive."
From the end of the 90s, the Albanian government discussed with the Japanese government to find support for solving that problem, that of sewage. In 2007, a Japanese engineering company provided the final draft—the solution would be to build a wastewater treatment plant, and build collector pipes that would collect water from the east of the city from Dajti to the Arrow Palace. Kavaja Street. In 2013, Dondi, a company from Rovigo in northern Italy, was appointed to lead the works. In 2014, the ribbon was cut.
In January 2015, Luigi Da Vita, the engineer from Bari, saw it for the first time as a river. You were called by Dondi to fix the delays in the works, and these within a short time, within a year or so.
La fognatura in cielo aperto.
*Arlis Alikaj and Donald Zaimi reported on the writings of this series.
**Edited by Altin Raxhimi
*** In the first photo at the beginning of the article, the flow of the Lana River in 1917
