Bunker mentality: the man who built Albania's underground Stalinist city

For nearly two decades, Feti Gjici worked on a project that was so secret he was made to lock the plans away in a safe before leaving his office each evening. He never spoke of it to his friends or family.

Gjici was the chief planner of the town of Kukës, in northern Albania, working during the years of the country’s communist regime, led by the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha. The paranoid and isolationist leader was terrified of impending war and built hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers to defend his population against the threat of invasion.

In Kukës, not far from the border with socialist Yugoslavia, things were taken a step further. Gjici’s task, beginning