Introduction

To a large extent, the period between 1945–1990 in Al-banian history, and the type of monumentality created during this period, is still unreadable to us today. This unreadability is partially the result of a politicization of the monumental heritage from this period, if not its entire historiography, as evidenced by the many con-flicting descriptive adjectives launched like missiles into the past: “socialist,” “communist,” “dictatorial,” “scientific-stalinist,” “terrorist,” “totalitarian,” and so on. This situation, however, has led to a climate of insistent negligence, if not outright condemnation and destruc-tion, as well as various gaps in the scholarly tradition at-tending to the various sorts of monumentality in the Al-banian cultural landscape. The most recent overview of Albanian monumentality was published in 1973, entitled Përmendore të heroizmit shqiptar (Memorials of Albanian Heroism).1 This album was published as a part of the campaign of what then Secretary of the Central Com-mitte of the Albanian Labor Party Ramiz Alia called “monumental propaganda,” being an integral element of the Cultural and Ideological Revolution. As a project, the Albanian Lapidar Survey (als), conducted by the Department of Eagles in 2014, aimed to give a first, and general, overview of Albanian monumentality from the period 1945–1990.