Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at retro cars show marking 20th anniversary of the General Directorate of Road Transport service:
Ladies and gentlemen
It may actually sound somehow absurd that the only person who doesn’t know how to drive a car is yet the one to deliver a speech at this meeting. However, Albania could never be more attractive than when its history unfolds in its all diverse forms through artefacts, just like it is the case of this unique exhibition, sometimes even so surprising that one may even wonder if all these beauties have really ever been here in Albania.
As a French statesman puts it citing a successful Citroen’s series, we will certainly never have enough from softness of the oil lamp, splendour of sailing shops or the magic of old seamen crews.
And here today, at a capital’s special space, a collection of vintage cars by which not only historical figures have travelled, but also passionate people, who today deserve a deep gratitude for the fact that they have managed to collect and devotedly preserve these cars – which I would call sculptures of the past – although unfairly bearing the burden of absurd taxes, which we will remove as of next January. From then on, the collectors of historic classic vehicles will no longer be obliged to pay taxes and instead they will continue to look after their precious cars, enjoying at the same time our gratitude expressed by the tax exemption.
And these sculptures of a history of movement towards the world’s continued transformation on four wheels, are in fact a throne and are, so to say, a moving centre of the human imagination towards the future in the form of an endless desire to run faster and faster and look more beautiful during that run.
These vintage vehicles and this event, which will be a movable one as it will be displayed all over Tirana and hopefully elsewhere all over Albania, are the symbol of progress and forward-moving.
No matter how diverse or troublesome the story these beauties have gone through, the truth is that it is a story that constantly haunts us and never ends with a single passenger, or with a special model, because it’s a story that always says “theirs is still more to come, there’s more to come.” The most traditional and perhaps the most modern one among the Albanian rulers, the missing resident of this palace reigned more while traveling by car rather than on his throne. He even made a nice gesture of philanthropy and generosity when the red Mercedes he had received from Hitler as a wedding gift and which we see every April 1938 footage during World War II was donated to the British Red Cross.
A king or emperor escaped unscathed during a life attempt thanks to a Fiat car, when he left this palace to drive along the Durres road.
The Mercedes-Benz with owl-eyed headlamps and ballerina-like body from the 1950s is exactly the car used by Enver (Hoxha), Nikita Khrushchev, Zhou Enlai and the king Norodom Sihanouk.
I don’t know whether this collection includes also a Mercedes Benz that the U.S. Secretary of State borrowed from Ramiz Alia, or moreover, I don’t know whether everyone is aware of the fact that Enver Hoxha’s Mercedes Benz was later used by the NATO Secretary General. So an entire history parades through a single car or a collection of vehicles.
However, the automobiles, and personal private cars in particular, remained a taboo for around 70 years in Albania and the state’s records show that only 375 vehicles were in use back in 1929 and almost all of them were Fiat cars.
With Italy’s capitulation, around 6000 Italian vehicles were left in Albania which were all nationalized by 1950 and a second phase of automobile, just all the present experts already know, the four-wheel realm was dominated by the ZIS, GAZ and SKODA vehicles, all state-owned ones.
Compared to the time when only one car circulated in one hour all over Albania and it sufficed only one office to issue the license plates, – those King Zog-era rectangular plates, or the Communist-era star bearing plates – the General Directorate of Road Transport faces a dizzy challenge to cope with the stupendous number of vehicles in use today, either because of the terrific inherited problems in this sector that used to make life harder for all of those, who, unlike me, wanted to receive a driving licence and a wheel at any cost.
And I’m glad that right now, when having a car is no longer a luxury but a necessity for people, we can openly state that the Directorate General of Road Transport is really bringing about a long-awaited transformation for all those who have to report at this Directorate, which is leading a long-awaited transformation that is reducing the work overload and inherited bureaucracy and is succeeding in relieving the heavy burden crated by an entire system of corruption and build instead an efficient service delivery system.
I don’t think it is coincidental that the General Directorate of Road Transport offers to the most enthusiastic admirers of cars, but to the wide public also the previously unknown profile of the head of this Directorate, the profile of a promoter of history and knowledge about history of automobilism, the promoter of taste in this world, through which the man’s ambition to move faster and increasingly farther has progressed and the profile of an institution that is increasingly being identified by its quality, innovation and the relation with the citizens literally.
“Just like cars, we too move on different speeds. There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.” This is how Marcel Proust used to write in one of his works.
Through this unique collection and the opportunity to discover 105-years of history of automobilism amid mountainous, and downward-sloping days, beautiful and gloomy days, the General Directorate of Road Transport provides us the opportunity that by enjoying this event we all feel grateful to those who grant this opportunity to us, as well as to this event’s organizers. At this point, I can attest that the Director General is a gifted driver, so much keen on cars so that he is already accustomed to his role and has in fact turned into the fastest car of transformation in the whole system of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy.
Many thanks to you all and I will let you now to enjoy this event by saying in the meantime that however I will not learn to drive a car and instead I will wait for the day when the car will learn to drive independently without a driver and transport me without needing me to know how to drive the car.
