A Distant Echo of War
- TALIA BERGER SPIVAK
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Our second week in Albania. Night fell over Tirana, and we sank into the kind of deep sleep that only a fresh relocation can bring. The bedroom in our apartment features a floor to ceiling glass wall, with a door leading out to a small balcony facing the front of the building.
Nothing prepared me for what happened next. Without a rising and falling siren, without a Home Front Command alert on my phone, suddenly and out of nowhere, terrifying explosions tore through the silence. They were accompanied by fierce, violent flashes of light piercing through the curtains.
I woke up screaming in terror. As an Israeli who woke up on October 7th to a chilling reality of thousands of terrorists infiltrating communities, murdering, and kidnapping, my brain asked no questions. In those seconds, I felt it was happening again. I was certain there were terrorists on my balcony, standing just beyond the transparent wall, shooting a submachine gun directly at the glass. Itay told me later that my screams were so terrified, he genuinely feared I would have a heart attack right then and there. That pure, paralyzing fear felt like a distant echo of war.
Of course there were no terrorists, and the balcony remained empty. As my heart rate slowly dropped and my breathing returned to normal, the absurd reality became clear. In his song Fireworks, Moshe Peretz sings that every day is Independence Day, and it turns out there is no more accurate sentence to describe life here in Albania. Since that night, and throughout the three months we have been here, I realized that hardly a night goes by without a fireworks display lighting up the city. And not just in Tirana, but all over Albania.
After the initial shock wore off and routine took over, I started noticing a curious pattern that made this much more than just fireworks. Very often, the sky explodes in color exactly when the clock strikes 00:00. Not a minute before, not a minute after. My curiosity grew, and I decided to investigate this phenomenon. I discovered that these midnight fireworks are part of a common local custom, which has two very different explanations.
The first, more heartwarming explanation is simply the local celebration culture. Young people and families here tend to celebrate birthdays the exact moment the date changes. They rent rooftops, step out onto balconies, or stand outside restaurants and shoot fireworks right at midnight to announce the start of a birthday, a marriage proposal, or any other joyous family occasion. The second explanation, which is much darker, is a persistent myth or local rumor claiming the fireworks are meant to signal the arrival of drug shipments or mark underworld activity. In reality? In the vast majority of cases, it is probably just people celebrating life, taking advantage of very lenient local enforcement laws regarding noise and pyrotechnics. This video was taken by our son Nimrod, who caught the city skyline suddenly lighting up from one of the rooftops during his visit here, right at midnight of course.
And this video was taken by me during a pastoral outdoor dinner by a pool, in the magical Albanian village of Dhermi.
Today, when I hear these explosions in my sleep, I no longer jump in panic. I understand that this is my new routine, and that there is something charming about a nation that celebrates its small joys this way. My Israeli brain might still go on alert for a split second, trained to look for danger, but my heart has already learned to smile at the lights and quiet down that distant echo of war.
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