Dear (lawmaker) Myslym [Murrizi], I was deeply moved watching you speaking about the people, just like this all of a sudden love burst for the Theatre in Tirana and whole Albania moved me deeply and suddenly in your face I saw (actor) Sander Prosi, who said in of his movie roles: “Well, how many things are said in your behalf, oh people!”
And since this is now the case and Albania, all of a sudden became the arena, where the Shakespeare’s sons are fighting an imaginary regime conjured up in the Lady Macbeth’s cup and given that we are going through a situation, where we are coping with a contagious disease, I would remind you and those who have decided to involve in this situation, not for a political plan, but because they feel spiritually hurt, I would recall the Shakespeare’s quote:
“Stupidity and wisdom are as easily grasped as infectious diseases. So choose your friends carefully,” Shakespeare once said.
Since the theatre of politics has been taken over by the politics about the theatre, then let me tell them that this is very good news at this moment, when, if we were not to do all the appropriate and right things, then we would have gathered here or even we couldn’t be able to convene here at all, and instead we could have been experiencing a very grave and serious situation with us being counting the dead, the severe wounds and the health system’s collapse in a confrontation, where many much more powerful and developed nations were defeated.
For once in my life, obstinately, I had to visit a beloved person at the Massachusetts General Hospital. I entered that hospital and I saw for myself what was going on there and I thought this is the God’s hand, because it is impossible. And I have seen with my own eyes how that human being, for whom I would give up my own life, recovered from coma. But today, 6,000 people have died at that very hospital in Massachusetts, which has a population twice that of Albania.
Just like any success, this success too comes at a cost and the cost of this success is the daily increasing number of those who now say “this was all faked,” the daily growth in the number of those who taunt and insult us and the number of those who see in all our efforts “the true face of dictatorship and the dictator, who locked Albanians inside, because this is what he wants to do, and who created a chain of authorizations and permits and who forced everyone to access the digital world and unfairly suffer a period of exile, sitting on their sofa in front of the TV screen, and unfairly experience the sacrifices of a deadly fight in their own beds, sleeping and without having to go to work, and so on and so forth.
This is the success cost!
Since we succeeded, but of course many opted for the wrong choice and refused to heed Shakespeare’s advice to choose what one happens to hear and fall prey to a chain of infection by stupidity, passing it from mouth to ear, ear to mouth, and mouth to ear again.
Albania will totally reopen within May. Albania’s borders will reopen and we will prepare for the tourism season, of course, not by asking those who make the wrong choice to turn their back to Shakespeare, while staring at the Theatre, but by preparing at the same time so that, in the event of a second coronavirus wave, which will be much more severe than the one we went through, and I am telling it today, even we are to reinstate same measures and do same thing, we cope with it again in a dignified way and with the same seriousness we handled the first wave, ranking Albania among a very small number of nations which are now admired for their results.
I am very proud that many of my international colleagues, including the President of Turkey last night, have expressed their admiration about what the Albanian state has done and Albania’s results on the overall world ranking. But it is certainly a deception, as “the moustache of nostalgia” just confirmed, because when a person goes through and recovers from evil, he tends to forget it quickly, while when he readies to face evil and easily defeats it, there is an erroneous tendency to think that the evil he faced was not worth the effort.
However, this is history by now. An initial phase is now over and I am convinced that whenever one would recall this time, all those who would opt to listen to the right people, choose to read the right works and decide to think properly, they will definitely respect our effort and what we already did.
Of course we will reopen, but not like we did at the Theatre with the crowd rushing into the square. It was the very crowd that had been long preparing after having occupied that building for two years and a half as if it was a castle from where the final and decisive offensive against the regime was to be launched. However, everyone has a weakness and the human weakness dies hard. And when your weakness is the love for the sleep, you are taken aback in the sleep while dreaming of the triumph, just to realize once you open your eyes that your castle has actually crumbled down and certainly pain and despair are what to ensue.
It is an inconsolable despair, for it is about the despair of him and of those who lose a battle, when they have determined the path and the cause of their fight. But the despair of those who have chosen a battle on the wrong path, with the wrong cause, is not consolable. I would refrain from adding that they have targeted the wrong opponents. I wonder how they haven’t known us yet and I wonder how you don’t know us yet. I wonder how you are still failing to grasp that we say what we do and do what we say.
Someone texted me saying: “You never got tired, but I wonder how is it possible you never gave up for 21 years until you demolished it.” Well, my answer is pretty simple; I didn’t enter politics to grab whatever I can. I entered and I am staying in politics to achieve success and stand strong in my beliefs. I am not that good for consensus I don’t feel embarrassed about this, because I stand for the policy of convictions and the fight for the beliefs.
However, going back to the hurt and pain, it is worth keeping on talking, because many, innocently, have nothing in common with those who lost the mortgaged and the forcibly occupied castle for 2 and a half years, and who have nothing to do with the Theatre itself, he says “why do you demolish an old building, since the world does not demolish the old buildings, it preserves them?” This calls for an explanation.
First of all, I want to ask all of you here and all of those who are worried about this. Do you know that project has been secretly and sneakily circulated in the form of a poetic drawing by an Italian architect and what has been actually portrayed in the media and described to the international partners as the demolished theatre was actually never built? Do you know that the author has never claimed authorship and has recognized it as his work?
Because that very project started to become like the one featured on the Italian architect’s drawings, but it never completed. The war happened and do the Tirana residents, those with a water well and nettle tree growing in their front yards and those speak on behalf of that time, do they know that Tirana parks and gardens were used for wheat crops growing back then?
What does wheat growing would have to do with the Theatre building, you might ask?
It has a lot to do with that, because back then, the autocratic order that was imposed by the regime that left its works and opened wounds in this country, drastically cut funds and allocated money to support war and drastically slashed, without the participation and approval by the authors, all the buildings project that were being constructed back then and indeed the National Theatre building is not the legitimate child of the Italian architect, but the bastard child born of the relationship between the author and the Fascist war that had to be feed on public money, as well as on wheat being grown in Tirana’s parks and gardens.
It was a work by the monarchy, yes, it is true, it started, but the work to construct it was suspended and that’s why this building was never considered neither by the old regime, nor by the later expertises as a decent building meeting the criteria to be included on the list of the monuments of the Albanian culture. There is not a single document, not a single line showing we are dealing with a cultural monument. So, no one has removed that building from the List of Monuments, because no one has put it on that List.
On the other hand, I am extremely pleased that, nevertheless, when it comes to fighting me, opposing me, elements like colours, theatre, debate about culture are introduced, a debate that has never happened before and most likely will never take place again. We have all been here when their government was seeking to build the new National Theatre on the site of the Pyramid. In my previous capacity as Tirana Mayor, I have received a delegation of a renowned Albanian investor, who had friendly, even fraternally ties with the then Prime Minister, but I am not used ever to mention names of people, businessmen, because I am not a rogue. Only thugs use the podium, the microphone and the word to attack and name individuals and businessmen, citizens of this country who mind their own business.
So, this very investor, together with a leading German group came to my office in my capacity as Tirana Mayor and presented the Plaza Shopping project to be built precisely on the site of the National Theatre, because the project required support from the Municipality. The design was really beautiful, featuring squares, shops, bars and restaurants where the water pool is found today, as they call it, but that pool between the two theatre buildings has merely served as a pond with frogs being its only spectators and to wash the private cars of actors. The project envisaged a square and two or three-storey buildings and it was really beautiful. I told them the project was beautiful, but the site will host the new National Theatre building.
The new National Theatre will be built on the site of the Pyramid, they said.
I told them that the Theatre could be built on the side of the Pyramid, “but I suspect a lot, because the Theatre doesn’t mean an arena. The stage is what gives the name to the Theatre and often, half of the theatre includes its invisible part, its backstage to ensure entire technical and logistical support for what we see on the stage and the Pyramid doesn’t offer this opportunity. However, I told them their project was undoable. However, the beauty of it was that the National Theatre was not built on the site of the Pyramid and no imaginary millions of euros were spent, just like the imaginary millions Lady Macbeth sees in her cup. Once she read the coffee cup for herself, but the demands have multiplied and worrying that others resemble and behave like her in grabbing and taking everything away so that once she and her Hamlet take over – to be or not to be in power – there would be nothing left for them. Six million euros invested in the Pyramid, of course secretly and silently, because the sons of Shakespeare and the courtesans of the French comedies back then were dealing with much more important issues rather than having to deal with the Theatre.
The result; some steel staircases were installed in the interior part, whereas the exteriors of the Pyramid were weirdly stripped naked. All marble slabs were removed and taken away during the construction process. Of course, I don’t know whether those slabs have ended up in their second homes along the warm Adriatic coast, or in the sun and moon hills to be used for the brand new toilets of Albania’s theatre elites. Perhaps, the slabs could have ended up as memorial plaques on the roads’ curves, commemorating those killed in accidents. Have you seen the memorials once built on the roadsides and which we have removed silently, because Albania is the only country where such memorials were to be found on the roadsides and foreign visitors thought it were only us the ones to have fought the World War II. There have been cases when foreigners stopped and paid tribute to these memorials.
So, this is a fantastic moment to quote Shakespeare for everyone again. “Stupidity and wisdom are as easily grasped as infectious diseases. So choose carefully the friends you listen to and when you listen to them, just because you know them, don’t think about the words being said about them, but instead just ask yourself, what have they done? And this is the true protest from the theatre community against the new national theatre project. Which was the true protest?
The real protest was what brought everyone together and where everyone picked up the microphone and appeared on camera without the media breaking news banner flashing at bottom of the TV screen. And there appears a portrait that makes you wonder: “Where have I seen this person? What kind of inspiration I got from this man?” And he literally became part of our families and homes, because he is a true artist.
Those with their names flashing on the breaking news banner have made a name for themselves. Robert Ndrenika, Leka Bumbo, Pëllumb Kulla, Gëzim Kame, Viktor Zhusti, Altin Basha, and many others.
And you didn’t need to read the name at all, because they very portrait opposing the project was telling you there is a problem here: “How could it be possible that the government will build a new house for these people and they still oppose it?”
Where are these people today?
They are all eagerly waiting for the new National Theatre built.
The last will of the great actor Kadri Roshi, who is seeing us, you and them from heaven and is certainly chuckling with his eyes pierce the air thousands of miles away, was to build the new theatre.
The great actor Naim Frashëri – and I am sure the only Naim Frasheri you have ever heard about is the one who has written the Livestock and Agriculture and you have no idea that another great Naim has ever existed and when I say you I don’t simply mean you here alone, because you stand no chance of knowing such things, but I am talking about those who have left this hall and still don’t know that he got sick an died precisely because of the cold he caught on that very stage.
These people wrote themselves a petition, while asking the opposition leaders to rally their supporters at the square and chuckling whether they have “paid them all,” – so everyone is bought in this country and everyone is bribed and corrupt, even this person is Robert Ndrenika – but only Luli (Basha) and Monika (Kryemadhi) are there to fight everyone and clean Albania of corruption, together with that old playwright and the comedian currently serving in the President’s office. They are the true ones. They are the ones seeking to save you people from us, “the bloodthirsty villains, criminals and mobsters.”
Having built a house of your own the way you want to build it, a house with a different shape built in a village and being surrounded by neighbours who have built two, three and four-storey private homes means you live in the saray (mansion) of the crime, while stealing the money earmarked for the construction of the new Theatre and own countless houses and properties in urban, rural and coastal areas, it means you have barricaded yourself in the trenches of the resistance and the final fight of the revolution. That’s why it is easy.
That’s why it is very easy to call on people to look at and find out who is the person speaking now?
I agree, they love the theatre, I can’t say they don’t. God forbid it I claim that the digital old man, who feeds entire network with is breaking news banner, he doesn’t want the theatre! He is a gifted born playwright.
God forbid it I say that Lulzim Basha doesn’t want the theatre. He is a born artist, an actor borrowed by politics to render the latter his Shakespearean spirit.
Could I possibly say that Ilir Meta doesn’t want the theatre?! How could I possibly do that?! He is ready to put his forehead on the constitution and become one with the eagle symbol on the constitution’s cover and all of a sudden show himself up at the peak of a mountain parachuting with Ҫim Peka serving his parachute bag, flying and diving to feed on the liver of us all.
Why?!
Of course, just for the sake of the Theatre, for the sake of Shakespeare and Moliere, and certainly for the sake of Voltaire, but Voltaire actually belongs to Monika. Let alone a senior Budina and a junior Budina, actors, who, after delivering their speech, rush to embrace the artist, Lulzim. And they claim they are independent. They claim to come in behalf of the society. These are the citizens who rose up against the dictatorship. They are seeking to overthrow ‘the regime.” They are for the first time delivering speech to a crowd and, yes it is true, they are excited because Lulzim is staring at them. The senior Budina; I am an Italian citizen. I don’t know him as Italian citizen. I know him as an actor playing roles in the socialist realism-era movies, secondary roles, mostly, because he was a good man and diehard communist. It is in his own right, since Sali was a communist too. But indeed, they were not socialists. And they were all in their own role in the theatrical performances back then just to emerge as Albania’s saviours from communism years later. They were undercover individuals. They had joined the Labour Party ranks as saboteurs and thanks to their acting gifts, they aimed for the stage. They had no stage back then. That was the stage. One used to earn a role in a movie just to say the following punch line: “eh, comrade, I made a mistake, but everyone is fallible.” And the comrade told him: “These are not the mistakes committed by an official in career, but of a degrading man.” And he kept thinking: ‘I feel powerless until everyone stands up to kick communists out. Yet I will go on staying here, degrade as a man until the right time comes for us.” But newspaper “Koha Jone” (Our Time) of Nikolle Lesi the second, because the first was a small figurant at a local newspaper in Lezha writing about the communist youth, he too looked at them thinking “the era of Shakespeare is coming.”
These are the truth worth telling people so that they can figure out who these artists are and what have they given to the public. And a thanks God, there was no need to turn that theatre hall into a hospital, because we could have coped with the novel coronavirus or the patients could have had their ears eaten mutilated by rats. Ear eating thing could well happen when rats unite in revolts. Could there possibly be a better and suitable place for the rats than that building? In which country around the world a rat was like a People’s Artist? The People’s Artist recited, played the grave drama of the society, whereas a rat moved its leg, waiving other figurants in the herd of rats hiding in other holes under the spectators’ feet. And the rats had to either mutilate the ears of any patient or they would get cold because of heat. It was exactly this heat engulfed us last week, but what could have possibly happened if patients were hospitalized there?
We, however, were not to do that, because for two years and a half it was not a building owned by the state. That building was an occupied state institution by those who were trained by the Labour Party. They got away with the Labour Party, yet the party trained them to wait for the final day. Myslim (Murrizi) knows it and that’s why he doesn’t join them there. Myslym says he can’t stand the protagonists of that time and claims he was born after the collapse of the regime, although his certificate shows he was born much earlier. Well, everybody is in his own right to claim I was born during communism era, but I decided to be born in 1990 at the Democracy square together with Sali and other comrades.
I can keep on speaking, because I have been for 21 years for that field to be cleared, not to bring Fushë, the company, but I have been waiting to build the new National Theatre, which will primarily be a decent theatre building for those very few people who go to the theatre and whose number needs to grow. If you were to consider the number of theatre tickets sold in the Republic of Albania and how many of them are bought by the same people, one could wonder how is it possible they had the theatre there, yet they didn’t they fill it and why didn’t this theater fall because of the ecstatic of the protesters eagerly to enter and see Desdemona! Desdemona, at least.
The new theatre will be built on that site.
I have other news to announce, but I want provide it in full, because I will take “the defendant’s seat” at the political talk show of Sokol Balla, together with “the victims of the police violence,” whom I am looking forward to facing them meeting as soon as possible. I will find myself in front of the journalists on whom the police used monstrous violence. I stand accused and I will appear before them. But the half news is that since the building designed by the Italian architect was never built and since there are still people – and I don’t mean these, because they don’t care about the building – who made me reflect about some fault or a void in this situation, you name it, or the ‘injury’ that could have been caused because of something that stands right in front of your eyes never look at it. When they tell you that a girl jumped from the third floor of the building, you wonder “no, how she did it?” We will take the original design of the old theatre building and we will return the old building, not to the alliance for the politics with the theatre, not to the artist-turned-politicians and politicians-turned-artists and who have gathered there, but we will rebuild it for the children as part of a broader program and the old structure will be rebuilt, but this time not there and not to serve as a theatre. You will find more about that in the future, when we will introduce the project and you will see for yourself the pilgrimage to that building. And only children and their teachers will be allowed to enter that building to attend drawing, music, acting, and poetry classes for the children competition and tell everyone how Tirana used to be once. But some nostalgic could also visit it. But, perhaps they could get angry when finding out that the building has been constructed somewhere else and could say “enough with it.”
This is what is going to happen!
However, I think it is worth building it.
Why are we deciding to do so?
Because, it is us who have been elected to make decisions. We weren’t elected so that you or those who have not been elected and even quitted parliament could decide about us. They say democracy means inclusiveness and I totally agree. While you are just mentioning numbers and pretend as if fighting the system, hoping to catch one more number, but I say democracy is not numbers. Democracy is all inclusiveness. It is in the right of everyone to say whatever he thinks and everyone is obliged to listen what others say.
Democracy is an effort towards understanding, sometimes an effort for consensus, yet democracy is not unanimity. And if we succeed in reaching understanding and gaining the support of all of those I mentioned earlier, namely Robert Ndrenika, Pëllumb Kulla, Altin Basha and others, then we have exhausted our efforts, but one is asking us whether we agreed with these two – actually two brothers, one Italian citizen and the other living here – who don’t want to build the new theatre after having occupied the building for two years and a half turning it into a theatrical dormitory – and expect us to say ok, let’s move and focus on something else since these two do not want the new theatre built.
And since we are talking about theatre, Moliere used to say people are strikingly similar when it comes to the words they say, but it is their deeds what distinguishes them.
And this is the case here in Albania, we sound all the same when it comes to words, all are criminals, thieves and mobsters. What you could possibly say and resist to when an illiterate with black gloves speaks from Prishtina tells you not to speak and accuses you of links with the mafia and crime. What could you tell him! There are just two options left when dealing with him; first, become a priest and pray for his soul, and second, trust just in things you believe in and accept the cost of your thinking, without forgetting for a moment the great master Faik Bej Konica, who used to say: Albanians – and he was not talking about the people, but these individuals who speak in the name of Albanians and who are there just to help Albanians and save them from Albanians – “Albanians can forgive you almost about everything, but they won’t excuse you about success.”
We don’t expect you to give success me and the Socialist Party success, but one thing is for sure; the accusations and the names of those out there will turn into dust, while our works will speak for themselves and us, even once we will no longer be in this city.
