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The journey to Lura and planting trees
“Albania is very beautiful!” we proudly tell foreigners when they want to learn about our country. “More than 450 kilometres of coastline, so many mountains, caves, lakes, lagoons, waterfalls, rivers”…
“Around 400 protected areas, a great variety of animals and living creatures, more than 11 national parks, more than 300 natural monuments”…
Ah! Sadly, before telling foreigners about Albania, we should tell one another what we have done for it, because this country’s natural beauty has been shrinking for some time!
On 29 November, I was able to join the latest effort organised by Ecovolis to reforest Lura National Park once more, a park left to neglect and to nature’s only predator: humankind.
I had heard a great deal about this park, but had never been there. When I went, it was shocking.
To begin with, the journey was torture. A vehicle with high clearance was essential. Tirana–Rrëshen: 72 kilometres in less than an hour and a half.
And then?! Rrëshen–Fushë-Lurë: 55 kilometres in 3–4 hours, along a road that was no road at all, where asphalt had not been seen since the last century. Riddled with the deepest potholes, it connected 8 villages: Tarazh, Prosek, Perlat, Ndreaj, Lëkundë, Kurbnesh, Mërkurth and Krej-Lurë.
Passing through them on that road was exhausting. At night, it became a horror!
29 November was bitterly cold. Below-zero temperatures, and snow. The wind was blowing.
Ice had blocked the road just beyond Lura’s former Turizmi hotel. With shovels, pickaxes and around 120 pine saplings, we walked more than 6 kilometres to Liqeni i Madh, the Great Lake, where the winds chilled you to the marrow and your eyes froze at the cold sight of the massacre by saw.
A crime scene, with no one convicted. A catastrophe!
Endless felled trees. Victims. Fallen trunks, orphaned of their branches and roots.
Breathless.
Suffocated by fire?! No! Absolutely not!
Fire does not cut trunks! A chainsaw does!
The scorched traces of killers who burn their victims’ bodies to cover their tracks. Everywhere, the remnants of guilt, which even the innocence of the snow did not dare to cover.
What remained of the trunks stood jammed against rocks like matchsticks, while in the background the lakes seemed to pray never to thaw again. All those lakes with such beautiful names, Liqeni Rrasave, Liqeni i Luleve, Liqeni i Pishave and others, petrified in winter’s lethargic ice. A silent landscape where the trees still awake cried out in fear, because the chainsaw had never stopped.
Bears, roe deer, lynxes, eagles… I saw only a fox there, and felt lucky. I crossed my fingers!
I hope there are many more.
You did not feel the cold while planting saplings. The thought that this tiny conifer would grow enormous for just a few strokes of a pickaxe and a shovelful of earth filled you with joy. One of the volunteers, whose family came from the area, said half-jokingly: “I’m paying off my father’s debt!”
The truth is that plenty of young people in this country love nature. Everyone must do their part, but the State must do the most!
The journey home after that sight left plenty to reflect on. For anyone who wants to know, more than 70% of this park, declared “national” on 21 November 1966, has been mutilated over 27 years. The irony was that, along the road, you could once again hear the chainsaw in the background, which local residents in the cafés around Fushë-Lurë said was merely “cutting up fallen trunks”.
The moratorium will not bring the parks back to life! Mass planting, prison for the sawyers, the truckers, the arsonists… Yes!
