Bunk'Art 1
Five-storey nuclear bunker below Mount Dajti, now a history museum and art space over 106 rooms.
Bunk'Art 1 occupies a bunker dug into the hillside below Mount Dajti on the eastern edge of Tirana. Built between 1972 and 1978 for Enver Hoxha, the party leadership and the general staff, it runs to five storeys and 106 rooms and was designed to keep the regime's command structure alive through a nuclear attack. Hoxha inaugurated it in 1978 but it was never used for its intended purpose, and it stayed sealed and largely unknown after the communist system collapsed in 1991.
The complex was opened to the public as a museum and exhibition space in 2014 and reopened permanently in 2016. Visitors enter through a tunnel and pass decontamination chambers, the assembly hall, communications rooms and the preserved apartments of Hoxha and prime minister Mehmet Shehu, with original 1970s fittings left in place. Permanent displays trace Albania from the Italian occupation and the German occupation through the post-war years and the decades of isolation, mixing documents, archive film and sound with contemporary art installations set in the empty rooms.
Highlights
- Five-storey, 106-room bunker cut into the Dajti hillside
- Preserved apartments of Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu
- Displays on the Italian and German occupations and the communist decades
- Contemporary art installations staged in the bunker rooms
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