Tirana Art & crafts

Tirana's contemporary art scene is small but active, and several galleries sell as well as exhibit. Work by living Albanian painters and printmakers is affordable by western standards, and the socialist realist inheritance means there is a distinctive graphic tradition to draw on. Reproductions of period posters sell well.

Craft workshops handle ceramics, textiles and woodwork, some of them producing to traditional northern patterns. Most of this sits in and around Blloku and the streets near the National Gallery of Arts. Ask about export paperwork for anything genuinely old; antiques have restrictions that new work does not.