Iconoclasm by omission: Albania’s authoritarian architecture and the afterlives of dictatorship

ABSTRACT This article explores the transformations of Albania’s architectural heritage across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tracing how the material legacy of dictatorship – from Italian fascist occupation to socialist rule and post-socialist transition – has been adapted, re-signified, or contested over time. It considers how successive political contexts, rather than producing wholesale erasure, have generated strategies of pragmatic reuse, selective preservation, and symbolic rewriting. In Albania, iconoclasm has been selective, partial, and politically contingent, shaped not only by ideology but also by economic constraints, shifting international alignments, and ambivalent memory politics. Focusing on Tirana’s monumental core, the discussion points to how the city’s-built environment embodies both continuity and rupture, revealing Albania’s uneasy negotiation with its layered past. As Albania remains a largely understudied case, this perspective seeks to bring new insight to ongoing discussions on the heritage of dictatorship in Europe and on contested, dissonant, and difficult heritage in post-authoritarian and postcolonial contexts.