© Vasjen Katro

"...It's the people that are fucked!" So said George Carlin.

Vasjen repeats this line to me as we walk through the wet streets of Korçë, discussing what has happened to his hometown.

This city rests thousands of feet above sea level and is encircled by the Morava mountains. As my hosts escorted me to the city we crawled up a cluster of foggy hills; they looked like naturally occurring ziggurats, having been sculpted into stratified apple farms during the communist era. Orange-tiled roofs checker the skyline and mountains loom behind them, wearing a thick fog. At night the fog descends into the streets and fills the cracks of the roads and alleyways. The hazy basilisk has followed me from Belgrade.

Korçë used to be the nerve center of Albania's cultural geist. Throughout the country's history the city produced and attracted poets, intellectuals, artists and authors. It produced Mihal Grameno, who was all of those things. But since, as Vasjen puts it, "communism broke," the bulk of the intellectual and artistic elite left Korçë after seeing what the Hoxja years had done to their town. Vasjen's friend Tom throws in:

"When the artists left, when they moved out, many people from the surrounding villages moved in, which changed everything about the mentality here. The mentality of the city. It died."

Combined with the foreign and domestic investment in Tirana that followed Albania's conversion to democracy, Korçë has become very quiet indeed. And many like Vasjen and Tom are ready to leave.

I've been lucky enough to make friends with these boys and their larger crowd, accompanying them almost every night to The Villa. It's a dimly lit establishment saturated in jazz and cigarette smoke. All of these young guys are students, many of them artists; all of them good-humored and bright. Any time we've spent away from The Villa has been at a flat decked out into an art exhibition.

My friend's cousin has just been engaged, which landed me at a family celebration held in what could be described as a mansion on a hill. We were served plate after plate—roasted vegetables, pork chops, the heart of some animal, and thick slabs of cake. And a lagoon's worth of the local wine.

I will be meeting many of Vasjen's gang in Tirana come New Year's Eve, and a couple in Pristina a week later. But I will fondly remember Korçë. And hopefully my new friends will, too. As so often happens in these cases, those who have a chance to reinvigorate their hometown will most likely be these young adults who are, for the moment, leaving.