Sazan between history and propaganda
Christened the “Key to Otranto” by the propaganda of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship, Sazan Island is, in all likelihood, the place where the history of that system’s paranoia can be told more clearly than anywhere else in Albania. But…
The dictatorship’s propaganda history says that the island was liberated from the Nazi-Fascist occupiers on 22 October 1944, 7 days after Vlorë’s liberation. The epic attached to that date later gave its name not only to the eight-year school built there, but to the entire military base.
It is commonly said that, in fact, the partisans found Sazan abandoned. This makes the “armed liberation” of Albania’s 5.7-square-kilometre island another creation of Hoxha’s propaganda. But that is another story. What is certain is that what happened to Sazan happened to all of Albania.
The “Key to Otranto” was built in the same way as the rest of the country: with two parallel histories, lived differently and told differently.
There are people, and during the visit I noticed there were many of them, who believed that 10 thousand people lived on Sazan at that time.
Others believe that the base was home to the system’s privileged people, who, together with their friends, holidayed at the island’s hotel and bathed in the most beautiful bay, Shënkollë, “eating oranges, figs and even peaches”, all while Albania was “starving for bread”.
I do not believe it was like that. I believe this is only one part of the story, the story told by the system’s propaganda. The other history, the real one, the one people lived, must be dug up and brought to light.
Accounts of life on the island
During our visit to Sazan, opened to visitors for the first time, fortunately offering at least some chance to understand the other history, our group included a middle-aged man from Lezhë who said the island had taken his youth.
He said he had done his military service in the early 1980s and that Sazan’s history was different.
The electricity supply to the island, he said, had been cut off in the late 1970s when the cable connection to the other shore was severed. There was power for only 4 hours a day, supplied by generators.
The entire area had never had running water. This was the main reason the island had not been used for long periods before.
Soldiers washed in salt water. Drinking water came in tankers from Vlorë.
Never 10 thousand people. Only a few families on Sazan, mostly officers’ families, who lived in fear amid the island’s reinforced concrete and cursed themselves for marking their relatives with such a fate.
The soldiers, most of them unmarried, endured hell through operations in extreme conditions dictated by the system’s paranoia, a system that had by then turned the whole of Albania into an island.
In a “Fierce War” with the world, the entire country had been bombarded with bunkers. Paranoia had also gripped ordinary people, who genuinely believed they could be attacked, let alone the soldiers of Sazan, the “Key to Otranto”.
In such conditions, soldiers sometimes died, and here and there those deaths went unreported. There had also been suicides. Sazan has a bay called “Devil’s Bay”, and, as the visitor said, the island could make you lose your mind and “end your life there”.
Sazan is the place where the dictatorship, for which the entire population worked and was mobilised for military operations, can be shown more clearly than anywhere else in Albania. But telling that story requires the accounts of the people who lived through the horror. The buildings left in ruins by the looting after 1997 do not do much on their own.
In fact, the whole island looked nothing like a military base. It looked as though a bomb had hit it. Like a part of Chernobyl that emptied of people after the explosion, with vegetation covering the traces of their lives.
Christened the “Key to Otranto” by the propaganda of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship, Sazan Island is, in all likelihood, the place where the history of that system’s paranoia can be told more clearly than anywhere else in Albania. But nothing gives you reason to believe that this opening of the island will serve that purpose.
