VILLA 31

Inside Enver Hoxha's Forbidden House

An underground swimming pool, an escape tunnel, thousands of books and a neighbourhood forbidden to the rest of the city. Today the dictator's former residence has become an art space. Yet its roaoms continue to tell the story of the distance between proclaimed equality and the real life of power in socialist Albania.

ELTON VARFI

Villa 31 in Tirana, formerly the residence of Enver Hoxha

Villa 31 in Tirana, formerly the residence of Enver Hoxha. Photo: Ivan Ruggiero (Wikimedia Commons), 2024 – CC BY-SA 4.0.

The house behind the wall

In Tirana, for decades, simply knowing the name of the neighbourhood was enough to understand where another city began. Blloku was not merely a residential area in the centre of the capital. It was the space reserved for the leadership of the Party of Labour, their families and the apparatus that protected them. While the surrounding streets belonged to ordinary life, beyond the checkpoints began a territory to which the ordinary citizen had no access.

At the heart of that territory stood Villa 31, Enver Hoxha's residence. Today the building is surrounded by bars, restaurants, towers and traffic: Blloku has become one of Tirana's busiest districts. For many years, however, the villa was one of the most protected and inaccessible places in one of Europe's most isolated countries. It was not merely a house. It was at once a family residence, a workplace, a representational space and a refuge for a power that protected itself from the very society it claimed to lead.

Blloku: a city within the city

Socialist Albania proclaimed that it had abolished the old class hierarchies. In practice, however, the system had produced a new geography of privilege. Blloku was its most visible form: residences assigned to the leadership, controlled access, reserved services and a physical distance from the rest of the population that reflected a much deeper political distance.

There is no need to imagine gilded palaces or a court in the traditional sense. Privilege in the Albanian system had a different scale. In a society where the choice of consumer goods was limited, travel abroad exceptional, information filtered and many products difficult to obtain, having large spaces, security, selected supplies, foreign books and services unavailable to most people already represented an enormous difference in living conditions.

Aerial view of Villa 31 and its garden in Blloku

Aerial view of Villa 31 and its garden in the Blloku district. Photo: Kleidieski (Wikimedia Commons), 2019 – CC0, public domain.

A house built for power

After entering the villa following its recent transformation, the Associated Press described a complex of about 4,000 square metres with more than one hundred rooms, built in the 1970s. That figure should be understood as the measurement reported by that source: other contemporary architectural records use different criteria for calculating surface area. Size alone does not tell the whole story. More significant is the way the spaces combined the domestic and institutional dimensions: reception rooms, family apartments, service areas, a library, protected spaces and underground routes.

Hoxha lived here during the final years of his life and died in 1985. By then he was the leader who had traversed the whole of Albania's post-war period: the break with Yugoslavia, the alliance and later conflict with the Soviet Union, the privileged relationship with China and, after that alliance deteriorated, an increasingly pronounced political isolation. The villa also reflected this progressive closure. It was comfortable, but above all it was defended.

The swimming pool and the door leading underground

The most striking detail is hidden in the basement: a private swimming pool. Its existence was documented photographically in 2019 and confirmed by subsequent descriptions of the residence. Beside the pool was an escape door leading to a tunnel and an underground bunker intended for use in the event of an attack; the Associated Press also documents the existence of underground tunnels built as shelters.

Taken on its own, the swimming pool risks becoming an easy symbol. The historical point is more interesting. In Albania in the 1970s and 1980s, a private indoor pool was not simply an expensive possession: it belonged to an order of possibilities entirely foreign to the daily life of almost the whole population. And the tunnel beside the pool tells the other side of the same house. Comfort coexisted with fear. The head of a regime that had built bunkers throughout the country also had, in his own home, routes for protection and escape.

In this sense, Villa 31 is an almost perfect place from which to read the psychology of Hoxha's power: security and suspicion, family intimacy and apparatus, political isolation and physical protection.

The library of an isolated country

Perhaps the subtler contrast is not in the basement but on the shelves. Hoxha's personal library contained thousands of volumes. Descriptions of the villa mention Marx, Engels, Stalin and Lenin, books on the French Revolution and on student movements in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the 1950s and 1960s; the Associated Press also reports books on sexual subjects that, according to the same source, were forbidden to ordinary Albanian citizens.

In 2019, accounts also described Hoxha's practice of consulting Parisian publishing catalogues every year and ordering batches of books. In 2025 the villa's new occupants still found works on the shelves that revealed the breadth of that private curiosity. It is difficult to imagine a more effective image of the paradox: the leader of a state that rigidly controlled access to information enjoyed access to foreign texts vastly broader than that of the ordinary citizen, for whom the availability of contemporary or ideologically suspect works depended on the filters of the state.

This does not mean that every foreign book was forbidden in Albania. That would be an exaggeration. It means instead that access to outside culture was selective and controlled, while those at the top of the system enjoyed incomparably wider possibilities. Knowledge, too, had its hierarchy.

Enver Hoxha in an official portrait from 1968

Enver Hoxha in an official portrait from 1968. Photo: Petrit Kumi; public-domain image according to the Wikimedia Commons file.

Outside the gate: scarcity without slogans

To understand Villa 31, one shortcut must be avoided. It is not historically accurate to reduce forty-six years of regime to the claim that 'the entire population was starving'. Economic conditions changed over time, and Albania went through different periods. But it is equally inaccurate to erase the reality of scarcity.

The Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress documents that in September 1946 the government imposed rationing of consumer goods; restrictions on foodstuffs were formally abolished in 1957. The same account records serious food shortages in the early 1960s and again in the early 1980s, when meat rationing was reintroduced. In state shops, the range of products remained limited, and people developed everyday strategies to cope with the lack of goods.

The academic research of Russell King and Julie Vullnetari on rural life in communist Albania analyses that system through the concept of a 'shortage economy'. The authors also highlight an 'institutionalised hierarchy of access': some groups had privileged channels to goods and services that were difficult to obtain, while others remained at the margins of that system.

This is where Villa 31 acquires its meaning. Not because it proves by itself that the country was starving, but because it makes visible the difference between those who lived inside the system of privilege and those who had to adapt to the system of scarcity.

Privilege did not need gold

Hoxha's house does not resemble Versailles, and that is precisely why it is easier to misunderstand. The relatively sober style of some rooms may lead one to conclude that there was no privilege. But privilege is always relative to the society around it.

A large protected space in the centre of the capital; a private swimming pool; security tunnels; access to books and information from abroad; supplies and services intended for the ruling circle; the possibility of living in a neighbourhood from which the rest of the population was excluded: all of this constituted a concrete form of inequality within a state that made equality one of its official principles.

Nothing needs to be added. The contrast is already in the facts.

After Hoxha: from forbidden place to a problem of memory

When Enver Hoxha died in 1985, the villa outlived its owner and then the regime itself. When the communist system collapsed in the early 1990s, Blloku ceased to be the closed citadel of the nomenklatura. Within a few years it became almost the opposite of what it had been: one of the centres of commercial and nightlife in post-communist Tirana.

Villa 31, by contrast, remained suspended for a long time. Too burdened with history to be an ordinary residence, too closely tied to power to be a neutral place. The question was unavoidable: what should be done with the dictator's house? Turn it into a museum? Preserve it intact? Open it to the public? Reuse it? Each choice would imply a different way of telling the past.

2025: the dictator's house becomes an artists' residence

In 2023 Albania's Ministry of Culture, the Directorate of Government Services and the French foundation Art Explora signed the agreement for the project to transform the villa. Since 2025, Vila 31 x Art Explora has operated as a centre for artistic residence, research and experimentation. The programme hosts artists and researchers, provides production and exhibition spaces and organises initiatives open to the public.

The symbolic reversal is clear. Rooms once reserved for an extremely narrow circle now host people from different countries; a place built to protect and separate has been dedicated to exchange. Art Explora explicitly defines the aim as a dynamic of 'public reappropriation' of the site and states that it seeks to balance preservation of its history with the creation of spaces in which new, plural narratives can emerge.

The transformation, however, is not free of questions. Some believe the villa should have been preserved as much as possible in its original form, as a document of the dictatorship. It is a serious objection. Whenever a traumatic place is reused, there is always a risk that its new function will soften what the place once was. But there is also the opposite possibility: that opening it up may finally make accessible what for decades had been deliberately invisible.

What remains of Villa 31

Today Villa 31 is no longer the forbidden and guarded place it was under the regime. This is perhaps the most radical change. The building no longer inspires the fear once associated with Blloku, and the city has grown around it almost to the point of swallowing it. But a house does not cease to be a document simply because its function changes.

The underground swimming pool, the tunnels, the library, the large rooms and the very fact of its location in the reserved district are not museum curiosities. They are fragments of a political system. They tell us that the isolation imposed on a country did not mean identical isolation for everyone; that scarcity was not distributed in the same way; that proclaimed equality could coexist with very concrete hierarchies of access, security and knowledge.

Villa 31 does not need to be burdened with legends. Its power comes precisely from what can be verified. Behind those windows lived the man who dominated Albanian political life for four decades. Outside those windows lived a country that could not enter. Today those doors are opened to the public through open studios, exhibitions and scheduled initiatives. Yet the distance between those two worlds remains one of the most important keys to understanding twentieth-century Albania.

Essential sources and references