Valentine's Day 2019: Why Tirana is the best place to spend it

'My heart returned as hard as dictactor Enver Hoxha’s paranoid pyramid'

Find leafy streets in Tirana (iStock)

I’m not suggesting everybody go to Paris for Valentine’s Day. Or Venice, which in dreary February is not quite the Canaletto painting it purports to be. (On that note, see our round-up of the least romantic cities in the world.)

I’m not suggesting that you go to some luxy country house hotel that does – howl – a “couples’ massage”. Don’t even think about “destination dining”. Step away from the bath butler!

I’m not even suggesting that you go away with your Significant Other. Take your Insignificant Other. Take your mum. Take your friend. Take your boss, whatever.

Here’s what I am suggesting: that you spend Valentine’s Day in Tirana, Albania. It was in Europe’s most underrated capital that I spent the first Valentine’s Day – completely by accident – with my now-husband, a decade ago.

Spending Valentine’s Day in Tirana is about as romantic as waiting for a Circle Line train. If you’re feeling at all soppy, find solace in Tirana’s concrete communism mired in a brisk Balkan wind. My heart returned as hard as dictactor Enver Hoxha’s paranoid pyramid.

We didn’t plan to spend Valentine’s Day in Tirana, of course. Valentine’s Day is a cheap shot of a holiday that I’ve never marked in any way. It just so happened that it coincided with a university reading week or something – and British Airways (a decade ago, the only airline to fly to Albania from London) was offering cheap as chips flights.

So why not?

Romance firmly aside, Tirana is a brilliant place. There’s cheap, strong coffee; thousands of concrete bunkers embedded in the hillside; and potholes in every road but Skanderberg Square, Tirana’s breezy plaza fringed by cafes and bars. There were power cuts every hour or so. The creakily gentrifying Blloku neighbourhood had a handful of sports bars and a casino, which at the time I thought was a desperately kooky way to spend St Valentine’s with your SO. Especially when we won more than a tenner.

We’d booked a dorm room in a nasty suburb somewhere. (Again, the best way to spend Valentine’s Day, hands down: asleep with a bunch of strangers, with absolutely no possibility of sex.)

The concrete pyramid is the former museum of the 20th century dictator Hoxha (iStock)

This hostel had six bunks to a room, where the only heating was an ancient storage heater that cut out every 20 minutes thanks to the frequent power cuts (also, the shower was cold – for the same reason). Our Valentine’s Day dinner was spent sitting cross-legged in the corner of a local Albanian restaurant making crude gestures of animals to pick the meat we wanted from the menu, then scarfing half-pint shots of local moonshine to forget it. I vaguely remember going to a lock and key party afterwards.

At least we aligned with Valentine’s Day marketing that night: huddled together on a bottom bunk bed purely because the hostel’s thin sheets and scratchy blankets weren’t warm enough. I woke up bent over the storage heater. This continued for three more nights.

There were no chocolates on the pillow, no roses in the room. It was ideal. Admit it: would you really rather be in some sexy city hotel?