The Albanians derive great comfort from their funeral rights, which is just as well. Byron felt compelled to describe the country as "a shore unknown, that all admire but many dread to view." When faced with Albania's notorious tribal warfare, banditry and blood feuds, even the Romantics beat a hasty retreat.
It has not taken long for Europe's poorest state to revert to form. After tasting the rigours of communist tyranny like no other Balkan nation, its people are again running amok-only this time democracy has provided the license to bear arms, snub authority and kill. The Albanians have acquired a sort of freedom but-in the absence of political order and in the presence of a daunting home-grown mafia-this little, black blip of a country is madder and badder than ever before.
I saw my last dead "free" Albanian on Monday 26th October in Tirana. He lay in a pool of blood, wine-dark pearls oozing from his stomach, in a side-street off Skanderberg Square (Albania's Trafalgar Square). It was 8:30am. The big wheel and bumper cars that adorn the square had been in relentless motion since 6am-to the accompaniment of the wedding march blaring from a ghetto-blaster.
The Albanians say that their brittle nerves have always made them rise early. Enver Hohxa, their evil, podgy-faced Stalinist dictator, instilled the habit, often murdering his closest comrades early in the morning. Amid all the anarchy, the early-to-rise, early-to-the-bread queue is the last vestige of a regimented society.
The dead man, a leading trade unionist, was shot at point blank range by supporters of a rival syndicate in a row over office space. One of the capital's two ambulances-a gift from the Welsh health board-came to collect him from the street where bilious gypsies, bare-foot children and scraggy chickens were competing among the rubbish. Mothers are said to dump dead babies in this debris, those made desperate by the loss of life savings in the country's famous pyramid schemes.
Tirana, a toy town par excellence, was built to "please the eye." The majestic, ochre-painted government buildings that dot its main avenue (designed by Mussolini's favourite architect) are only veneers for the dark menace behind. Beyond them, in the Hoxha-era high-rises, people sleep with pistols under their pillows.
Outside Tirana there are no fa?ades; just stony-faced peasants in stony-faced hovels. Here, amid the slush, armed robbers, often high on hashish, are the state. Here in the land of the living past, Albania is busy devouring itself.
You enter this wretched world of idle factories, crumbling warehouses and ugly, bare-brick tenement blocks by way of one of Tirana's many potholed roads. My own ascent into the highlands was made with the escort of unemployed Albanian army officers wielding Kalashnikovs and pistols.
Even under Hoxha's ruthless regime, when the hills were used as a dumping ground for political prisoners and convicts, this was the dark corner of a dark world. In the new world, the highlanders have become experts in trafficking everything from donkey loads of arms to drugs and people. In the mayhem, all the international aid organisations dispatched to the region have pulled out.
"Up here," says Mehmet Berisha, whose disgraced cousin Sali was Albania's first post-communist president, "we were left to live alone. The outside world, meant nothing to us."
On my first night in the border town, Bayrun Curri, the rat-a-tat-tat of a Kalashnikov announced another killing. As we ate our meal of rice and yoghurt in a restaurant buzzing with beetles, a man was fatally shot in a squabble over land. His brother had pulled the trigger. He lay there, in the middle of the street, for 15 minutes before anyone bothered to pick him up.
Albania is like a truculent teenager, but its people are now violently, and often na?vely, struggling towards adulthood-an age that even the poorest of their neighbours enjoy. Most can't wait to grow out of the transition phase and most would leave Albania if they could. Many already have.
Those who have stayed are hoping that the country's newest prime minister, a 30-year-old former student leader, will be the man to improve their lot. Should he fail, Albania's well-tended cemeteries will offer the only escape from the anarchy.
