Childhood Inspiration: How Monumental Sculpture Shaped a Sculptor’s Vision

It was the late 1970s, when I was just six years old, that I had first sight of a piece of sculpture that fired my imagination and has stayed with me to this day. Once a year, usually for the summer holidays, we would take the bus to visit my grandparents in the town of Korҫa, Albania. The town was only 170 miles away from where we lived in Saranda, but, during those days of Communist rule, it took eleven to thirteen hours to get there, as the roads and buses were so poorly maintained. There were various points on this long journey that I can distinctly remember, where my childhood curiosity was awakened, and I was particularly alert: the iron bridges where we crossed over the river; the snow-covered mountains; the old derelict castle.

The Barmash Monument in Albania commemorating the Borovë massacre in 1943

But the best bit by far was seeing a huge statue on the rocky hill face. It was on the site where the first battle had taken place between the Albanian liberation army and the Germans during World War II. The statue depicts two figures, leaping forward into action. Almost as soon as the statue came into view, the bus rounded the next corner and the vison disappeared. Luckily for me I could see it again on the way home to Saranda, and after that first sight when I was just six years old, I made sure I always sat at the front, next to the driver, to get a better look. Later in life I learned that the statue was created by the sculptor Thoma Thomai, born in the same part of Korҫa as my parents, and who would eventually become my teacher.

Thoma Thomai was head of the sculpture department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana where I managed to secure a place to study sculpture, aged 18, following two competitive rounds in a highly selective process. I remember when he first visited our studio, he was a stern figure, and the only two things he ever mentioned were the importance of moving away from our work so we could study the piece from a distance and making sure we kept the studio tidy (I’m better at following the first piece of advice than the second!) In my 3rd and 4th year at university, as I got to know him better, I began to see more of his warmth and viewed him as less of an authoritarian professor and more of a friend. I remember our discussions about sculpture, about his education in the 1960s in Prague and him telling me how his line of teachers could be traced back to Janaq Paҫo, an Albanian sculptor, and Kostas Dimitriadias, a Greek sculptor who was a student of Rodin. On many occasions our conversation turned to the Barmash Monument and how it was created during the communist era in Albania. Sculptors at that time had to follow the communist doctrine and were only permitted to base their work on Albanian history. I remember Thoma telling me about one of his own professors who had spent most of his career secretly working on nude figures. When this was discovered by the authorities, he was given the choice of either destroying his lifetime’s work himself or handing it over to the regime who would destroy it for him.

In 2018 when I was travelling from Saranda to Korҫa for my first visit in over twenty years, this time by car, I stopped to see the Barmash Monument for the first time. The two figures that I’d first seen from the window of a bus forty years ago were as impressive up close as they were from a distance. It was worth the wait. The silhouette of the figure throwing a grenade in the skyline is particularly powerful and reminds me of Rodin’s La Défense. To me, this socialist realist monument depicts the hunger for freedom Albanians have shown throughout history, always occupied by another country but never fully subdued. It also reminds me of the sacrifice of my grandfather’s generation who fought against the occupation of Albania in WWII dreaming of a better future.

Thoma Thomai is now 88 years old and still goes to his studio every day.