Albania's Sazan Island has been fought over for millennia—and now it's at the center of the "Flamingo Revolution"

For thousands of years, world powers have traded control over a small, lush isle off the southwestern coast of Albania. Sazan Island, a 2.2 square-mile spit of land, lies within the Strait of Otranto, a narrow channel separating Italy and Albania, and has served as a crucial base for powers seeking to dominate the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. 

There are no permanent residents on Sazan, and yet it has played a key role in Albanian history for more than a century. Recent plans to build a luxury resort on the isle have generated international attention and local protests, with some residents, concerned about the ecological impacts of such a development, declaring that “Albania is not for sale.” It isn’t clear whether the proposal will ultimately go through, but the discourse has once again raised Sazan’s global profile.

“The island no doubt has a long, complicated history,” says Theodora Dragostinova, a professor of history at The Ohio State University who researches the Balkans. With its strategic location at the edge of Albania’s Bay of Vlorë, different empires—including the Romans, Venetians, British, and Ottomans—have each controlled it. 

“It is certainly one of the best examples of how location can disproportionately determine the importance of a certain place,” Petar Kurečić, professor of political science at University North in Croatia, noted in an email. “There has not been a significant historical power in the region (or even outside of it) that has not controlled or tried to control Sazan.” Possession of the island once helped determine control of the Adriatic, and with it myriad port cities, such as Venice, Dubrovnik, and Trieste. (Today, the area is mainly prized for its ecological beauty and potential to attract tourists.)  

In antiquity, the Romans utilized the Bay of Vlorë as a place of respite for their ships. Several key battles during the Roman Civil War —a fierce fight between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great from 49-45 B.C.—occurred along the shores of Albania’s mainland. More than a millennium later, in 1264, the Venetians and Genoans, fighting for dominance in trade, staged a naval battle near Sazan’s coast. And by the 15th century, Sazan had become an official naval outpost for the Ottoman Empire, explains Steven Seegel, professor of European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Fast-forward to 1912, when Albania declared independence from the Ottomans: suddenly, Sazan became a disputed territory, with multiple nations—Greece, Albania, and Italy—vying for control. Eight years later, Italy took possession of the island, which it retained after Mussolini came to power in 1922. “[His] forces in the interwar period built defenses there, including barracks and military installations which proved important for control of the Adriatic Sea,” Seegel says. During WWII, the Italians and, for a brief period, the Germans occupied the island.

When World War II ended, Albania finally gained ownership of Sazan as part of the Paris Peace Treaty in 1947. The island then played a prominent role in the regime of Enver Hoxha, who led the country from 1944 until his death in 1985. His communist government was isolationist and repressive; religious figures and other individuals seen as threatening to the state were jailed, exiled, or executed, and the government seized private assets. 

“Hoxha was obsessed with the idea of a military attack against Albania,” says Elidor Mëhilli, an associate professor of history at Hunter College. With assistance from the Soviet Union, an Albanian ally, he built up Sazan’s defenses, including  thousands of bunkers to protect against invasions and a secret tunnel network used to store submarines. (A secret CIA memo from 1961 referred to Sazan as a “‘Red Gibraltar’ in the Mediterranean.") When Hoxha’s relationship with the USSR eventually dissolved, he reportedly refused to give up some of the submarines. The Soviets, not wanting to cause a conflict by crossing NATO waters to retrieve them, let their prized ships go. 

Throughout his regime, military infrastructure on Sazan had dual functions: guarding against perceived threats, and helping prevent Albanians from fleeing the country, Dragostinova says. “The way I see it, it became a symbol of the regime’s brutality, secretiveness, and paranoia.”

When Hoxha's communist government eventually fell in the 1990s, “the island was reclaimed for the nation and nature,” Dragostinova says, and in turn became a symbol of liberation to many Albanians. In 2010, the Albanian government established the Karaburun-Sazan National Marine Park, which encompasses Sazan and is home to roughly 300 types of plants and 40 species of birds, such as the alpine swift and the Eurasian eagle owl, one of the largest owl species. Over time, the national park has also become a haven for endangered Mediterranean monk seals, nesting Loggerhead turtles, and hundreds of flamingoes. 

Five years later, Mëhilli says, Sazan was demilitarized and opened to the public. (It is still technically a military exclusion zone, placing it under the purview of Albania’s Ministry of Defence.) Though portions of Sazan have opened to tourism, it still lacks significant infrastructure, and overnight stays are typically prohibited. Visitors hoping to see its limestone cliffs must travel by boat for the day. 

Today, Sazan is “a unique time-capsule of the Cold War in the middle of the sea,” echoes Mëhilli. Its network of tunnels remains, as do relics of command bunkers, weapons depots, and nuclear shelters. Undetonated mines and other munitions have been found on and near the island, according to some news reports. Because Sazan once housed military officers and some families, it also had a collection of homes, schools, and medical clinics, Mëhilli says. (Parts of Sazan, he notes, were looted during civil unrest in 1997.) Due to the long history of war in the region, the waters surrounding Sazan and in the Bay of Vlorë are littered with shipwrecks, primarily from WWI and WWII. The area has yielded several important archaeological discoveries and has become popular for divers.

Because so few people had access to the island for decades, its ecosystems are largely pristine. “From a historian's perspective,” Mëhilli says, “this is one of the few relatively untouched places remaining in Albania that speaks to its deep history.” The debate unfolding now is what will become of that legacy—and the protests nod to it with their new nickname: the “Flamingo Revolution.”