By: Auron Tare
“The Bënja Baths between revelry and the ruin of Albanian nature”
Të lidhura
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The images shared a day earlier, showing people singing, dancing and celebrating atop the ruins of Albanian nature in the Langarica Canyon, brought to mind the film “The Fall of Rome.”
In one of the most powerful scenes of that 1960s cinematic masterpiece, the citizens of Rome dance drunk with joy while the barbarian hordes are already at the city gates. The ending is known: Rome is sacked, civilization collapses, and Europe enters what history knows as the Dark Ages.
Today, the Langarica Canyon and the thermal waters of Bënja are a living example of how we Albanians, as a nation, are heading toward a Dark Age in the protection of natural heritage. Bënja is a reflection of how a visionless government, aggressive toward nature and blind to heritage, can destroy the essence of a country called Albania.
I first went to Bënja around 1987, with the Partizani basketball team. From that time on, returning there became a ritual, a pilgrimage to one of Mother Nature’s masterpieces. The landscape was untouched. Green meadows, shady trees, Mato Gruda’s water mill, and a cobbled road built during the Ottoman period led you toward the mouth of the canyon. There stood the elegant stone bridge, a masterpiece of local architecture. Beneath it, the natural pools, surrounded by river-smoothed stones, gathered the healing waters. It was a landscape that brought to mind Japanese shrines, where nature and the human spirit coexist in silence. Anyone who saw Bënja in those years was left breathless. Years later, I also had the good fortune to explore more than ten still unstudied caves, where traces of human life go back as far as the Early Paleolithic. An archaeological, scientific and tourist treasure, almost unknown.
The damage to the area began when the medieval cobbled road was covered with asphalt. It was the first blow to the site’s historical memory.
The second blow came two years ago. The Albanian Development Fund, with financing of more than two million euros from the World Bank, launched an intervention that not only destroyed the natural character of the area, but turned Bënja into a symbol of a development philosophy that confuses concrete with development. Excavators entered the bed of the Langarica. The river’s ecosystem was altered. Centuries-old stones were removed and turned into retaining walls. The natural pools were replaced with concrete basins, alien to tradition and unsuitable even for the thermal springs themselves. The Ottoman bridge did not escape either. Its smooth stones, which had carried hundreds of caravans, were replaced with slabs, creating a restoration that respects neither history nor the basic principles of conservation. Across this landscape rose a giant parking lot, several alpine-style buildings and, of course, a restaurant. As if every public project in Albania is somehow fated to end with a restaurant. But the greatest damage is not aesthetic. It is economic. Anyone who knows rural tourism understands well that after spending more than two million euros, the economic impact for the local community will be almost negligible.
This area has been designed to become a camper van parking lot. Anyone involved in tourism knows that camper tourists spend little. They usually travel with their own food, use very few local services, and do not create a sustainable economy for residents. The numbers may rise, but the community’s well-being will not.
Meanwhile, just a few kilometers away lies the medieval village of Bënja. The monumental houses made of tuff stone are collapsing. The village’s medieval church is falling into ruin. The school was closed long ago and has turned into a pile of stones. And this is where the question arises. What if those two million euros had been invested in reviving this village? What if the houses were restored and turned into guesthouses? What if local families were supported with gardens, livestock and produce that would supply these guesthouses? What if the church were restored and opened to visitors? What if, through this benevolent work of the government, emigrant families returned and, with them, the voices of children to the village school? What if Bënja became a center of mountain tourism, with well-maintained trails and local guides? What if the ten caves of Langarica were studied by international universities, bringing students, professors and scientific expeditions that would stay for weeks in the village’s guesthouses? What if they were followed by cultural tourists, the kind who seek authenticity and not asphalt? That would be development, not only for tourism, but also as an example for other areas.
These are two completely different visions for Albania. One sees nature as a space where concrete must be poured. The other sees it as a heritage that must be preserved, because authenticity is precisely the greatest wealth we have. Let the reader judge for himself.
Therefore, Mr. Prime Minister, Bënja is not a debate about thermal waters. It is a debate about the way we understand civilization. A people that begins to celebrate the destruction of its own natural beauty is not yet ruined. But it has begun to grow accustomed to ruin. And this is the most dangerous stage of any barbarism. Those citizens dancing in your colorful photographs do not know that music over ruins is the last hymn of a civilization.
