What’s the story of Zogu i Zi neighborhood

Cosmic C is called the installation in the center of the area known as Zogu I Zi (blackbird).  The author of this artwork is Elidon Xhixha, and it was inaugurated in 2018

Two pyramids are placed in each other, and they represent the people of Albania and its culture, linked together in the middle.

But there is a legend about this neighborhood, after the name Zogu I Zi.

In that place, a young man died and was buried. Every day for a year, his mother came and cried in that place. After a year, she also died. After that, a blackbird replaced her daily, staying in her son’s grave.

There is also a song about this tragedy: a blackbird is singing in the grave of a young man…

The villagers of the mother and son came here and built a tap water surrounded by black stones, and on top of it, they carved a blackbird.

This is the real story of this toponym. But later, this place was linked with another story, which speaks of a brothel primarily visited by foreigners, especially Italians, after 1944. The brothel was not in the same place; it was somewhere in what is today the Field Aviation, close to Lana River. The story of that brothel, which was not there for long, can’t substitute a legend and a real place that many citizens of Tirana knew from their ancestors. People still call this area by the toponym Black Bird.

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