The House of Leaves was originally built in 1931 as a maternity clinic, but during WWII the Germans converted it into offices of the Gestapo. After the war, it became the surveillance headquarters of Albania’s secret police, the Sigurimi. From 1944 to 1991, the Sigurimi listened in on people’s phone calls, opened letters, and arrested/interrogated/ tortured/imprisoned and even executed those deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime.
Although the museum is award-winning, I found it strangely sterile. It shows you how surveillance was done, and why. It has walls covered with the names of those arrested (including high-ranking officials), but it doesn’t show you what I feel is the most important part: how it affected the lives of everyday Albanians. Perhaps those stories are told in the numerous documents scattered about the museum, but those are written in Albanian without an English translation.
But imagine a world where surveillance can be anywhere. You could be denounced (truthfully or not) by that mother-in-law who never really liked you. You have to be careful in all telephone conversations because those were routinely eavesdropped. Or perhaps you made a comment that seemed fairly innocuous (“maybe they should build infrastructure instead of bunkers”) but you ended up in prison for 15 years because of it. Foreigners’ hotel rooms were routinely bugged. If you became a person of interest, there would be bugs placed in your apartment — or perhaps the Sigurimi would make an exact replica of your purse or hat, place a bug in it, and swap the items out when you weren’t looking.
I accidentally ended up going to two museums related to the secret police (I thought the second one was about a different subject). The House of Leaves was the surveillance headquarters during the Communist years. I’ll write more about the other one later.
Exterior of the House of Leaves, so-called because of the abundant ivy covering its walls — although some say it refers to the many leaves of paper in the files reporting on Albanians. If you hold your ear to one of the two listening devices on the lawn, you hear the sounds of the city amplified.
This was the interrogation room. The drawings on the wall show some of the many ways they tortured confessions out of Albanian citizens.
More “interrogation” methods.
A monument to Stalin on Skanderbeg Square in Tirana (it doesn’t exist anymore). Although officials called it Socialist Albania, the communist regime was more a form of totalitarianism — where there is a one-party monopoly that controlls all aspects of individual and collective life: the economy, education, art, science, media, private life, morals, ideas, and feelings.
This is an example of a movie poster for one of the films made during the 1970s and 1980s. These films tended to focus on State Security and the struggle of the communist regime against enemies both internal and external. Of course, the regime always won against the enemies and saboteurs.
A close-up of a bugging device. I think this was in reality about 3/4 of an inch (roughly 2cm) long .
If the Sigurimi thought they needed to listen in on you, they’d make exact replicas of some of your ordinary household objects, place bugs in them, then swap out their bugged version for your original when you weren’t around.
That blue machine in the center of the room could record ten different telephone conversations at once, carefully annotating date, time, and telephone number.
Propaganda was a frequent tool of the regime. This montly magazine was called “In the Service of the People”. Their primary goal was to spread the notion that there was a dangerous internal enemy who could be lurking anywhere within society, and only the Sigurimi could save Albania from them.
This was the Hotel Dajti in 1980. As one of the hotels where foreigners were allowed to stay, its rooms were routinely bugged.
This wall and the three others in the room had long lists of people who had been convicted (three walls) and executed (one wall) during the Communist years.
The House of Leaves is located at Martyrs e 4 Shkurtit Street in Tirana. It is open daily from 9:00am to 7:00pm.
October 10, 2025