Election Monitor

Tomorrow Cindy and I will be going out as part of the Embassy election monitoring mission.  Our team is me, Cindy, and Bruna.  Our assignment is the Central Election Commission here in Tirana.  It is not a polling place, but they will collect results.  Its main function is to set the rules and rule on disputes and answer questions from poll workers around the country.  Other teams left today for cities around the country.  I think we have about 15 teams.  They will be going to actual voting places.  It should be interesting.

Here people vote for the party, not a person.  Albania is divided up into 12 voting districts.  Each district has so many representatives alloted by population.  The biggest and smallest are Tirana with 32 and Kukes with 4.  There are 140 seats in Parliament.  There are 33 (I think) parties on the ballot.  A party has to get at least 5% of the votes in a district to qualify for a seat.  Most of the 33 parties will not have a representative.  In order to have some influence, though, many of the smaller parties enter into a coalition with a larger party.  There are 4 parties in the SP and DP coalitions.  They're the two big ones.  There are two other coalitions, but I'm not sure how many parties.  In each district the parties list the names of prospective members of parliament from one to whatever.  In Kukes there may be five and in Tirana maybe 40.  Then after it is determined how many seats each party gets the MPs will be named.  The tricky and horsetrading nature of it all is that a party can give a percentage to another party.  So say if the SP has 34.5% in Tirana, and it takes 32 % for 17 seats, they are going to waste 2.5%.  If their coalition partner G99 has 3.2, SP can give 1.8 to G99 so they can meet the 5% requirement and get a seat, and the coalition will have 18 instead of 17.  This goes on in all 11 districts.  These deals are not a matter of law but of whatever the coalition agreed/agrees on.  So, as I say, it should be interesting.

Birra Korça

I sometimes walk home from the embassy.  It takes about 45-50 minutes if I don't stop anywhere.  Yesterday, though, we got off work at 2 pm so as to avoid the traffic and general congestion which was increasing because of final large rallies for the two biggest political parties ahead of Sunday's election.  So three of the guys I work with went to the Birra Korça (Kor-cha) place by the Dinamo soccer stadium and had beer and qofte (meatballs, sausages-- qofte seems to be an all-encompassing term.)  We got there about 2:30, and it was full, I guess because that's a more normal eating time.  Most days when we stop there it is about 5:30 and it's mostly empty, 5:30 being about halfway between lunchtime and suppertime.  Anyway, about half of the tables were filled with either men and women, and a few just women.  My colleagues commented that five years ago it was extremely rare to see young women out by themselves, but of course it is widespread now.  They seemed to think this was an improvement, adding what one described as a "softer" ambience. Guys here are much more discreet in their girl-watching.  They will follow someone with their eyes, but usually not turn their head and stare.  So I caught one of the guy's eyes following someone down the sidewalk, so I asked him what was he looking at?  He was real embarrassed, and of course the other guys piled on until he turned red.   They're all in their 40s -- I doubt it would embarrass the 20s age group, but I don't know.  It was an enjoyable rainy afternoon diversion from working.  Bledi says the biermeister at Korça spent time in the Czech Republic, which is what he claims gives Korça its Pilsner quality.  I don't know, some people say it is the Korça water.  All I know is it is pretty good beer.

Hagia Sophia

The area from the Topkani Palace, Hagia Sophia, across the Hippodrome to Blue Mosque, covers only a few hundred feet.  It has been a focal point of western history for centuries.  Traveling around Europe one sees churches and chapels built in honor of one military victory or another, or for deliverance from some terrible clamamity, but Sultanahmet built the Blue Mosque more as propitiation for a loss to the Persians, a blatant attempt to get Allah back on his side.  The 17th Century was hard on the Ottomans -- they started the century being stymied in their attempt to expand eastward, by the Persians, and ended it in a disastrous loss to the Hapsburgs at Vienna, which ended their northward expansion.  They spent the next two hundred years in more or less steady decline, earning them the "Sick Man of Europe" moniker.  

 Their defeat by the Hapsburgs opened the way for attemp ted Hapsburg expansion into the Balkans, and while they were never fully successful, they succeeded in creating enough animosity that Slavic groups organized against them, the most notable being the "Black Hand," the Serbian group which orchestrated the assassination of Mr. and Mrs. Grand Duke Ferdinand of Austria 95 years ago this month, and which of course led to the beginning of World War I two months later.   Had the Ottomans won the battle in Vienna, the Danube might now have an Asian side and a European side, culturally if not physically.

So on to Hagia Sophia, built in the early 6th Century in what was then called Constantinople, seat of the patriarch of the eastern church, what we in the west call the Eastern Orthodox Church after the Great Schism of 1054.   The official name of the church is longer, but most people call it either Hagia Sophia or Santa Sophia, but the Sophia is not a female saint, but comes from the word "widson," so the name means literally "Holy Wisdom."  I wonder just how much holy wisdom it's seen in its 1500 years.

One of the early Christian-era mosaics in a side-entrance hallway.
Sultanahmet Mosque in the backround, from a second-floor window at Hagia Sophia.


The second floor main balcony which opens on three sides to the main level below.  Access to the second floor is via a ramp which switches back and forth through one of the outside piers.  
One of the early mosaics from the Christian era.  The Ottomans covered them up when they turned it into a mosque.  Some are slowly being uncovered.  It is pretty time-consuming, painstaking work.
From the balcony level, looking toward the main entrance. The railings are carved stone.  On one level it is a disappointment to walk in and see the scaffolding erected, but on another level it is good to see the buildings being cared for.  The sheer number of ancient structures in southern Europe is astounding.  Many deteriorate simply because funds aren't available to keep them up.  
A section of the ground floor marble flooring.  The slabs are roughly the size of a sheet of plywood, probably more like 10 feet.  Widths vary.  Cheaper grades of marble were used for flooring, street paving (remember the Dubrovnik photos -- this is not a test!)

and other assorted structural needs.
A one-piece marble urn.  There are two in the back of the church.  They hold water; you can see the sphigots toward the bottom.
This little house is inside the Hagia Sophia wall, and is where the man stayed who calculated the time for prayer.  Five times a day, set on a celestial schedule.
Outside the church, water fountains for foot washing.  And other things, I suppose.  I don't know if it was reserved for foot washing.  At Blue Mosque there were long rows along the courtyard walls, and all I saw were people washing their feet.

Blue Mosque

Sultanahmet Mosque, or the Blue Mosque, from the courtyard.  All the domes and half domes lead up to the central dome, 141 feet high.  The mosque was built in the early 17th Century across the Hippodrome from Hagia Sophia.  Hagia Sophia is about 1100 years older than the Blue Mosque.  

View of the mosque from the inner courtyard.  The door above is one of many sets that are all around the courtyard.  It is made of many jointed panels.  Makes our typical six-panel doors look pretty amateurish.  The little fountain in the courtyard seemed pretty undersized to me. 


There are four huge round fluted pillars that hold the mosque up.  Obviously any has to have something structural to hold the roof up, but these pillars to me detracted from the overall design.  They do the job, like poles holding up a tent, but architecturally, to me, they detracted.   A large gothic cathedral, by comparison, for all its ponderous bulk, is ingeniously light looking.  The weight-bearing structures are certainly visible, but the flying buttresses are outside and hold up the central gallery invisably (at least from the inside).  Look at a picture of the fan vaulting at King's College Chapel in Cambridge for a look at what we might call the unbearable lightness of stone.  Anyway, it struck me as the difference between a pole tent and an umbrella tent, for those of you camping aficionados -- one has the pole inside, one is suspended from an outside frame.   


These last three are of the tiles mostly.  The photo just above has part of the metal circular framing that holds up all the electric lights, which you can see in the photos above.  Tulips were everywhere in Istanbul, and the two Turks who I asked about it said Holland imported their tulips from them.  I haven't researched it, but it sounds plausible.  A large number of the tiles in the Blue Mosque have a tulip motif.  The two trivet-size tiles I brought home with me have tulip motifs.  Some of the tiles I posted pictures of earlier from the Topkani Palace have tulips.  Pretty conclusive, I'd say.

Bad Biography

Everyone I work with is old enough to remember the communist era.  The regime fell 17 years ago, depending on how one cares to date it, so one doesn't have to be all that old to remember.  The youngest guy at work is about 40, so they were young adults in 1991/2.  One of the guys has told me that his grandfather, or as they say, the father of his mother, used to own 1000 hectares, which were confiscated.  To this day they have not gotten it back, and most likely won't.  The father of his father had a fairly elegant hotel in Tirana by 1940 standards, which was confiscated.  They did get that back, although all the porcelain and silver were gone, and the government demanded they pay for the cheap contents, which they evidently didn't do.  They now rent it out as a dormitory for a private university nearby, known by its initials as UFO University.  The brother of his father was executed by the communists during the post-WWII power struggle.  They never knew for sure, but always assumed he was executed.  During the 90s they started asking around and found out where he was buried.  

My coworker couldn't go to university because he had, as he says, a bad biography.  His brother somehow got into university but got kicked out after a year because they discovered his bad biography.

Who knew the communists were like the Old Testament Jews, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the sons, for generation after generation.

Moving In Again

Welcome to June.  Everyone says it is going to be really hot this summer.  The forecasts say we'll reach 40 this summer.  40 C equals 104 F, so I hope they're wrong.  I don't know how they know, if this is some sort of computer modeling like the hurricane forecasts I'm used to, or maybe the antithesis of the wooly caterpillar.  All I can say is that the jackets and sweaters are stowed and the tee shirts and sandals are out.

I spent the weekend babysitting two guys who ripped up the parquet floor we had in two rooms and replaced it with tile.  The parquet was not put down good and kept coming up.  Over the past several months a big bubble would appear and I'd pull up two or three or four squares of hopelessly warped parquet and fill the resulting hole with a tile and newspaper and cover it with a carpet.  More bubbles were appearing and we'd run out of our appetite for throw rugs, so when the embassy renewed the lease they added that the floor had to be replaced.  They worked Friday and Saturday and left late Saturday night with the floor finished, new baseboards down, and the heavy furniture back in place.  I spend Sunday reconnecting computers and TVs and dusting furniture.  I tried to help some but they didn't want my assistance.  The thinset mortar they used came in bags of powder, and you added water and mixed it in a bucket with an electric drill with a mixer paddle on it.  The tile guy was pretty good, and it wasn't nearly as dusty an event as it could potentially have been, but it raised some dust nevertheless, all of which settled, of course, in the living room/kitchen.  By the time final cleanup came around there was a thin film of white dust on everything.  I was sweeping the floor, so imagine my shock when they told me to quit because I was making dust because the broom bristles were too coarse.  So I went back to drinking scotch and watching.  During the process of putting the furniture back in place, every time they'd lift something it would reveal the clean outline surrounded by a film of dust.  I couldn't resist pointing out to Samir that he must have used the wrong broom.  He doesn't always appreciate my refined sense of humor.  Anyway, Taylor and I went out to eat Sunday evening to celebrate having just moved in again.

Samir is an interesting fellow.  He lived in London ten or so years and did construction work, which is how he learned what he learned about the trade.  He built this house in a combined Albanian/English style, meaning that to look at it it is not a totally typical Albanian house for Tirana.  Houses here are built the way office buildings are in the U.S. -- a basement and/or foundation is poured, and then each floor is formed and poured to the desired number of floors.  Concrete pumper rental is a big business here.  After that the perimeter walls are made with orange tiles that look sort of like dwarf cinder blocks. Then they're stuccoed inside and out and painted.   All the features like stairs, balconies, roof overhangs, are all poured.  Samir put up some stud walls with sheetrock in this house, and has told me that the neighbors kept telling him it was no way to build a house, that it would fall down during the first earthquake.  I hope I'm not here during the structural testing an earthquake provides.