HOUSE OF ISMAIL KADARE

It was in this house (Muzeu Shtëpia Kadare) that Albania's greatest writer was born in 1936. If you've taken the Chronique de la ville de pierre (1973) with you, you'll find the setting of young Ismail Kadaré's phantasmagorical childhood here. But like him, you'll need to use a little imagination. For the old ^19th-century fortress house was looted during the civil war of 1997, then partly destroyed by an accidental fire in 1999. Completely renovated and opened as a museum by the municipality in 2016, it retains its two main buildings topped by a magnificent roof of thick slate roofs supported by beams. It was these same slate roofs which, when they collapsed, caused what Kadaré calls "the bombardment" of his house. Not included in the tour is the huge cellar that housed the local inhabitants during the Greco-Italian war (a key episode in the novelist's work). On the upper floors, the wood-panelled great hall, originally designed for receptions, is the most carefully preserved area. It houses a few objects that once belonged to the family (including little Ismail's cradle), but everything has been refurbished and lacks patina. The maze of rooms hardly evokes the sometimes heavy atmosphere described by the writer, notably in La Poupée (2015), a short story dedicated to his mother, Hatixhe Dobi: "Houses like ours seemed as if they were purposely built to perpetuate hostility and misunderstandings."