The Day My Father Learned His Home Was Bugged

In 1976, Deputy Interior Minister Feçor Shehu summoned my father to his office. Shehu – known for brutal interrogations – began reciting word-for-word a conversation from my uncle’s dinner table days earlier.

“During our meeting, he questioned me about conversations at Jani’s house, confirming my suspicion that our recent visit had been monitored,” my father later wrote. “I confronted him about the surveillance, but he remained silent.”

My uncle Jani, a decorated war veteran, had complained that Albania was building bunkers instead of houses. That single remark earned him 15 years in prison for “anti-government agitation.”

Shehu then advised my father to divorce his pregnant wife (my mother) to protect his career. The logic was simple: distance yourself from families of political prisoners or become one yourself.

My father refused. But the surveillance continued. Years later, after communism collapsed in 1992, two young security officers confessed everything: “They revealed that, as a perceived dissident, I had been under constant surveillance until the collapse of communist rule.”

These experiences are documented in my father Ilia Zhulati’s memoir, “Lifting the Iron Curtain: The Untold Story of the Restoration of Diplomatic Relations Between Albania and the United States”.

The Building That Listened

The House of Leaves sits on Rruga Dëshmorët e 4 Shkurtit, across from Tirana’s Orthodox Cathedral. Its walls are covered in ivy that gives the building its name, though locals also say the “leaves” refer to the countless files once stored inside.

Built in 1931 as Albania’s first private maternity clinic, the building’s purpose shifted with each regime. The Gestapo claimed it in 1943. Then from 1944 to 1991, during Albania’s communist era, it served as the Sigurimi’s nerve center for technological surveillance – the place where phone calls were recorded, mail was opened, and conversations were transcribed.

After communism fell, the building sat abandoned for over two decades. Rain leaked through the roof. Documents scattered. Equipment gathered dust. In 2017, it reopened as the Museum of Secret Surveillance, winning the European Museum of the Year Award in 2020.

What You’ll Find in Those 31 Rooms

The Listening Posts

Banks of East German Uher recording machines line the walls. Each could monitor multiple phone lines simultaneously. Standing here, I think about the officer who sat with headphones on, transcribing my father’s calls for five years. Someone doing their job, destroying lives one conversation at a time.

Objects That Betrayed

Glass cases display the creativity of paranoia: shoes with transmitters in the heel, handbags with sewn-in microphones, radios that transmitted instead of received. The Sigurimi would study your belongings, create perfect replicas with bugs inside, then swap them without you noticing.

Chief engineer Nesti Vako ran technical operations for 22 years. He later bragged about developing lightweight Albanian bugs after studying in China. By 1975, Albania was producing its own surveillance equipment. The museum displays devices from 18 countries alongside these homemade instruments of control.

The Laboratory

The former maternity lab found new purpose: developing surveillance photos, analyzing fingerprints, producing keys for any lock, detecting invisible ink. Where doctors once tested blood samples, agents processed evidence that could send someone to forced labor.

Hotel Dajti’s Total Coverage

Every foreign visitor stayed at Hotel Dajti, where every room contained multiple microphones. A sub-basement housed staff who monitored guests 24 hours a day. The museum preserves the actual recording equipment pulled from the hotel after 1991.

The Files That Destroyed Trust

Shelves hold thousands of dossiers. The museum lists 18,000 names of Albanians prosecuted for political crimes. Over 5,000 were executed.

Architect Maks Velo, imprisoned for designing a building deemed “insufficiently socialist,” later read his file: 120 pages compiled over 30 years, with reports from 20 informants including his mother-in-law. She wrote: “Maks Velo is a person of bourgeois beliefs. He is a person with no character.”

A popular saying captured the reality: “Eleven spies for every ten people.” When anyone could be an informer, everyone becomes suspect.

The System That Devoured Its Own

Even the regime’s most loyal servants weren’t safe. My father witnessed Defense Minister Hazbiu’s destruction through “grim video footage of his brutal torture, used to extract false confessions.”

As he observed: “Slavish obedience and self-sacrifice offered no protection from the regime’s capricious cruelty, as even the most loyal servants, like Defense Minister Beqir Balluku and Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, discovered too late.”

This paranoia created what he called a “ludicrous system” where everyone watched everyone, and loyalty meant nothing. “If even a high-ranking official like him wasn’t safe from the regime’s arbitrary accusations, what hope did I have?”

Stories from the Files

The museum displays testimonies that stay with you long after leaving:

Father Anton Luli, arrested in 1947 after ordination, spent nine months imprisoned in a mountain latrine. On Christmas Eve, guards hung him naked by cords under his armpits until he nearly died from cold. He survived 40 years of imprisonment.

At Tepelena concentration camp, families of “enemies” were held without trial. Survivor Klora Mirakaj remembered delaying death reports in winter so the living could eat the dead’s rations. Six people died daily, mostly children and elderly.

These aren’t distant historical events. Many survivors still live in Tirana. Some refuse to read their files. As journalist Qazim Loloci explained: “I am afraid of learning I was betrayed by a close friend. It would break my heart.”

Visiting the House of Leaves

Essential Information:

• Vendndodhja: Rruga Dëshmorët e 4 Shkurtit (opposite Orthodox Cathedral)
• Orari: 9:00-19:00 daily
• Tickets: 700 lek adults, 500 lek groups (12+), free under 12
• Payment: Cash only – no cards accepted
• Time needed: 90 minutes minimum
• Gjuhët: Albanian/English labels, audio guides in French/Italian

Before You Go: Photography is banned inside – ironically enforced by CCTV cameras. The museum includes graphic illustrations of torture methods and survivor testimonies that can be disturbing. Not recommended for young children.

The preservation approach left everything untouched. Architect Elisabetta Terragni called the decay a “historic tattoo” – evidence of the regime’s collapse. You’re walking through rooms frozen at the moment the system fell apart.

The Underground Connections

Beneath the building, concrete tunnels with heavy security doors connected the surveillance headquarters to other sites. The museum provides partial access to these passages when available. The concrete still sweats moisture. Sound carries strangely – footsteps echo from unexpected directions.

Standing in these tunnels, you understand the Sigurimi wasn’t just in this building. “Plainclothes agents shadowed the guerrillas as they boarded the Tirana Express,” my father recalled of one incident. The surveillance network was everywhere, connected by threads both physical and psychological.

What Stays After You Leave

The museum ends in the garden, where benches offer space to process what you’ve seen. Prayer calls from the neighboring mosque drift over – sounds of religious freedom that would have meant prison during the atheist state years.

But you don’t really leave this place behind. Walking back onto Tirana’s streets, past cafes full of conversation, you hear those ordinary sounds differently. These are what the Sigurimi was recording. The casual complaint that destroyed my uncle’s life. The joke that ended careers. The silence that marked you as suspicious.

The House of Leaves succeeds because it refuses to comfort visitors. It simply shows you the rooms where the listening happened and lets that knowledge settle into your bones.

For my family, it validates what we always knew but couldn’t prove until those officers confessed in 1992. For visitors, it demonstrates how surveillance transforms a society – not through dramatic raids but through the quiet work of people in basements, wearing headphones, transcribing your dinner conversation.

Go Deeper

The surveillance stories in this article come from my father’s firsthand experiences as documented in his memoir “Lifting the Iron Curtain: The Untold Story of the Restoration of Diplomatic Relations Between Albania and the United States”. The book provides the full context of how Albania’s paranoid isolation shaped not just domestic surveillance but also its eventual opening to the West.

For those visiting the House of Leaves, reading his account beforehand adds layers of meaning to what you’ll see in those 31 rooms. The bugs and files aren’t just artifacts – they’re the tools that shaped real diplomatic careers, real families, and ultimately, Albania’s path out of isolation.

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