Hoxha pyramid, Tirana, Albania

Hoxha pyramid - darkometer rating : 2 - A rather bizarre building in the middle of Albania 's capital city Tirana . Its angled shape vaguely reminiscent of a pyramid and the fact that it was originally intended to be a museum in honor of the country's deceased Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha gave the edifice its informal name. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: When after over 40 years, Albania 's hardliner ultra-Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha finally snuffed it in 1985, it was decided to honour him not just with the grand hero's grave he was initially given at the Martyrs' Cemetery in the south of Tirana , but to build him a gargantuan mausoleum-like place of worship right in the centre of the capital. Hoxha's architect daughter Pranvera herself, together with her husband Klement Kolaneci, saw to the design of the edifice, officially to be called "Enver Hoxha Memorial Museum". Allegedly, the resultant building became the most expensive ever erected in Albania. Its extraordinary pyramid-like shape clad in white marble would have been matched inside with an exhibition celebrating the late autocrat (or should that be Pharaoh?) and his glorious achievements through the display of all manner of artefacts somehow connected to the life and works of the great dead man. (As such it could have been somewhat similar to North Korea 's " International Friendship Exhibition "). But it was not to be. The building as such was finished in 1988, but only a few years later communism began to fall apart all around Eastern Europe and eventually in Albania too from ca. 1991.