Visiting my birthplace

Koçova AirBase

There is always a bitter sweet moment when when you recognise the place, but do not know the people walking the streets

Travelling is an intensely personal experience, especially when visiting familiar places. For this reason my recollection here of the visit to Berat and Kucove together with my brother Rudi and his family will not necessarily follow the chronological order. We left Tirana at about ten o’clock and headed east towards Elbasan. We sped down the motorway that cuts through rolling green hills before passing through Krraba Pass tunnel that stretches for 5 kilometres. Bypassing Elbasan we turned south towards Dumrea plain which is dotted with over eighty small lakes, the biggest of which is in Belsh. The single carriage road meanders through pleasant green pastures and small villages surrounded by olive groves and vineyards, many appeared to have been recently planted.

In just over an hour drive, we approached Kucove, but we entered the town from the north and for a moment I lost my bearings. I wasn’t expecting to reach my birthplace so quickly and from a different place. As a child I remember the journey lasting over three hours and we would we drive west of Tirana through Durres before heading south. But I immediately recognised the Airbase near Kucove and proudly announced to everyone in the car that I knew exactly where we were. I turned round and told Klea, Rudi’s daughter, ‘Kucove is famous for three things, its oil fields, the Airbase and as Arian Koci’s birthplace’. She politely laughed to indicate joining in on the joke about it being famous for being my birthplace, but she had missed the rusty oil rigs and the Airbase as she was busy scrolling through the Instagram page of her new pride and joy, a striking new puppy named Lumen, or ‘Bad Boy Beans’ as she liked to call him.

Kucove’s oil fields were initially developed in the 1930s by the Italians who bought exploration and extraction rights from King Zog’s government and proceeded to build the town’s infrastructure that survives to this day. You can still see the elegant villas built for the Italian engineers with tennis courts and surrounding gardens. The town’s main street is a long wide thoroughfare lined with palm trees. I have very fond memories of the place where I was born and spent the first nine years of my life. Much has changed since, and new apartment blocks have been built in places once occupied by the Italian villas.

As someone who is not lucky enough to still call his birthplace home, I always look at the place through my childhood’s eyes. I recognise most places, but do not know the people walking the streets or sitting in the cafes. My uncle and his family still live there and we paid him a visit. They were excited to see us and keen to share with us the news that they were at last able to join their daughter in Italy who needed their help to bring up her four children. I was happy for them, but it was a bitter sweet moment. Selfishly, I was sad they were going as they were my only link with the place and the flat they lived in. It is the place I mostly associate with my grandmother who passed away few years ago.

Kucove Airbase was established in the 1950s and it’s my father’s first posting. He started his career there as a young fighter pilot, after four years of training in the Soviet Union. He met my mother in town one day and the rest is history, as they say. One day, when I was seven or eight I decided, together with a friend to skip school and walk two miles away near the airfield to see what was going on. I still remember watching in awe MIG-19 fighter planes coming to land and I now understand what it must be like to be on the receiving end of a fighter plane coming down towards you. My friend’s father was also a fighter pilot and we reasoned that playing truant was worth it. Our teacher was not amused, but I have no memory of being told off by my parents. They were both strict disciplinarians, but the perhaps the excitement of that day overpowered any bad memories.