Heritage-making and Democratic Ideals in Albania: Spaç Prison as a Site of Dialogue

Today, more than 25 years after the fall of Albania’s Communist regime, the country is engaged in a struggle over how to deal with its Communist past. For decades, Albania had not taken the steps that many other transition countries have gone through: opening the secret police files; initiating a truth and reconciliation commission; undertaking a concerted effort to find and identify the bodies of those who had forcibly disappeared; or reinterpreting the art and artefacts of Albanian Communism through a reflexive gaze. Within this context, sites of memory, such as Spac Prison, have taken on a particularly important role in shaping the discussion over memory and heritage-making for Albania’s recent past. Originally a mine, Spac Prison developed into a notorious political prison and forced labour camp, modelled after the Stalinist gulags. It is the only such site to be listed as a protected cultural heritage site in Albania. The current presence of a mining company at Spac Prison adds to the complexity—raising tensions between the original purpose of the site (plus the region’s need for economic development) and its history as a place of persecution. Underlying these tensions is the recognition that heritage-making involves a constant struggle over whose stories and pasts are acknowledged and how. Since 2014, the NGO Cultural Heritage without Borders–Albania (CHwB-Albania) has been engaging as wide a range of stakeholders as possible in a long-term process to develop Spac Prison into a place of dialogue. This dialogue and human rights-based approach recognizes that the conservation, interpretation and adaptive reuse of a site are all reliant on how the site becomes ‘heritage.’ Our paper demonstrates how the heritage-making processes surrounding sites of persecution/atrocity/memory such as Spac Prison have important implications for the promotion of human rights and democratic ideals in Albania today.