Reading the Traces of 20th-Century Rurality in the Albanian Rural Landscape

This article makes use of the notion of modernist rural landscape conceived as the result of imprints that modernity left within different countries’ territories. As an example, the Albanian rural landscape is introduced as a palimpsest in which the country’s 20th-century history acted as a visible mark on the territory. Socialist processes and transformations in the countryside generated what could be identified as an extensive Albanian modernist rural landscape. Considered a palimpsest in which the tangible and the intangible are strictly intertwined, the landscape should be tackled through interdisciplinary methodologies and biographical approaches. The authorship of the modernist rural landscape is often primarily associated with ideological policies and engineering schemes implemented by governments during specific historic periods. However, by applying a biographical approach to the study of the 20th-century Albanian rural landscape, emerges that the everyday authors are also the local communities and the people. The urbanization of the countryside was a clear and tangible goal of the communist regime that was reflected in the establishment of many new rural centres as part of the agricultural cooperatives or agricultural and livestock state farms. The aim was the reduction of socio-cultural differences between urban and rural contexts; a modern living for the new socialist rurality that had to be realized also in the countryside through urban planning and architectural standardization. In the late 1940s, among the first cooperatives, the livestock agricultural cooperative of Asim Zeneli was founded as the first of many others in the Drino Valley, Gjirokastra district, South Albania. What are the memories and narratives of those that experienced socialist rural life in the cooperatives? What do they remember about the cooperative’s establishment and the edification of the new rural centre of Asim Zeneli? What is left and still can be recognized in today’s village urban texture? By adopting a biographical approach that considers the overlapping of local community narratives with historically published and unpublished sources, the last part of this article focuses on relocating and reconnecting the memories of the inhabitants to the Asim Zeneli village’s architectural and landscape legacy.