With music blaring and the engine roaring, the Black-Pearl sped toward Sazan Island, located 18 kilometers off the Albanian coast. On Wednesday, September 10, around 11 am, the two-deck boat unloaded several dozen tourists, most of them Polish, next to a rusty crane in an abandoned port. Apart from a handful of soldiers and their black dog stationed at a tiny military outpost, no one else lived on these five square kilometers of lush vegetation. Among concrete-domed bunkers scattered between the trees, abandoned apartment buildings and ruins of a hospital built in the late 1920s, numerous signs warned of land mines and explosives.
Roman before this era, Venetian in the Middle Ages, Greek in the 19th century, Italian under Mussolini, then under the control of the People’s Republic of Albania after World War II: The island, once a strategic outpost for the Eastern Bloc, has been almost entirely abandoned since the fall of the USSR in 1991.
The military remains did not seem to interest the visitors that day in the slightest. With a beach bag in one hand and a selfie stick in the other, they headed for a cove just a few dozen meters from the port. During the brief hour-long stopover, Jenny Moon, 67, relaxed in the clear water, crowded with vacationers. A former airline employee from Boise, Idaho, she plans to move to southern Albania to escape, as she put it, “the rise of fascism” and Donald Trump.
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