For Ina Shkurti, like so many Albanians, the island of Sazan has played an outsized role. As a child she bathed in its “always calm and emerald green” waters, as a teenager it figured in her dreams and as an adult it was an indelible part of the memory and desire that drew her back, every summer, to Vlore, her home town across the sea.
What Shkurti never imagined was that plans to build a mega-resort on Sazan – one of two luxurious complexes on Albania’s southern coast backed by Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner – would trigger a revolt, an uprising that has convulsed the Balkan state in a spasm of disgust over the perceived excesses of “a rotten oligarchic class” just as it hopes to complete accession talks with the EU.
