How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive

This article How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

It was on the third day of the revolution that the mood changed. Once again, many thousands of Albanians had descended on Tirana’s central square after work. Once again, the speeches and banners were focused on stopping a wild and legally protected coastline from being razed for a luxury resort. But this time the vibe was tense. Some people had entered the crowd who were angry, screaming abuses and trying to set fire to the placards. 

Ilir Kaso, an artist and lecturer at Tirana University of Arts, stood nearby with his two daughters, aged 11 and seven. “My daughters were very frightened. My youngest asked to leave the protest, and so we did,” recalled Kaso. But as they emerged from the crowd, they found themselves facing what Kaso describes as “the flamingo group,” a collection of a hundred or so protesters wielding pink flamingo banners and a few pink polystyrene flamingos on poles. “‘Papa look, flamingos, let’s go there,’ said my youngest, and immediately I understood what we had to do.”

The flamingo group was a loose coalition of artists and environmental activists based in Tirana. The partnership had first formed more than a decade earlier under the banner of “Friends of Vjosa,” a movement to stop one of Europe’s last wild rivers from being splintered by 45 hydroelectric dams. Kaso became a part of what proved to be a very successful campaign. It birthed Europe’s first Wild River National Park, and on a personal level, it transformed Kaso’s art, pulling him away from abstraction and towards nature. He and his wife named their first daughter after the river.

When trucks and bulldozers suddenly rolled into a protected part of the river’s delta in late April, and started fencing off a large section of the coastline, the coalition quickly remobilized, meeting in person and via WhatsApp groups to work out how to stop the destruction. Kaso attended the first small protests along the fence line, photographing the flattening of ancient sand dunes where turtles nested, and the laying of concrete over wetlands that host hundreds of migratory bird species, many of them endangered.

Kaso had followed but not posted in the WhatsApp debate over which bird should be the symbol of their campaign. The environmental activists wanted one of the more threatened species to be made prominent — the Dalmatian pelican, the Northern lapwing — but the artists had decided on the flamingo, an easily recognizable bird with an iconic color and shape. After seeing how the bird had become a refuge for his frightened children, Kaso quickly started tapping out a message in the chat.

“I wrote about what happened and how we could create somewhere stationary, a shelter where we flamingos can stay all together and bring in the children, to protect them but also to expand the good vibes,” he said. “Because children have such good energy, they don’t have doubts or traumas like us. And we cannot wait for this protest to be damaged and become violent. This bad energy is going to destroy everything. We have to fight this with good energy, but by going out of the crowd.”

Kaso had experience setting up a shelter like this. During the pandemic he had helped to open and run a community school for his daughters and other young children in his area. The experience had a profound effect on how he taught his art students. After the pandemic, he rejected rigid lesson plans and formulas to be more curious and open to their ideas. “The children taught me a lot,” he said with a smile.

The artists and activists in the WhatsApp chat immediately embraced Kaso’s idea. Not only was there a shared fear of violence derailing this uprising, but the surging size of the crowds was clearly straining families. Every evening, between the speeches on the square, messages were going out over the microphone about lost children who needed to be found. On the chat, artists started offering to bring coloring pens and run drawing sessions. The next day, 20 feet of paper was laid out beside the Pyramid of Tirana, a tree-lined landmark between the square where protesters gathered and the prime minister’s office that they marched to. It was instantly flooded with grateful parents and curious children.

The Children’s Corner, as it is now called, has become an established feature of the revolution, entertaining children for approximately three hours every evening. On busy days, more than a hundred children will sit on the ground drawing their favorite birds, singing into megaphones, or playing with flamingo placards, while a dozen adults strive to monitor activities. It has become a hub not just for families but the flamingo group itself, who use the space to synchronize their chants, strategize about their movements, and pass out their pink foam placards to fellow revolutionaries.

Kaso describes the Children’s Corner as the sun of the protest, always radiating with light, fun and good vibes. And the flamingo group has taken on the role of dispersing those vibes to the rest of the protest. When a speech has been particularly aggressive or divisive, a flamingo parade will take flight, weaving into the crowd, and then chanting, drumming and dancing to relieve the tension. Then they will return to the Children’s Corner to recharge.

“The Children’s Corner is very important for keeping this protest peaceful,” Kaso said. “I think it is our most important weapon, like a Trojan horse, against the people who want to end this protest and make it a mess. It means the police cannot throw their gas and create aggressive situations. Also for the people — we are telling them we are here with our children and our families, so we have to be careful.” 

The space has triggered an outpouring of generous donations, though much has had to be turned away. Food from strangers was considered too risky, while taking money might give the impression this was a commercial childcare service. But offers of more coloring pens and art materials have always been readily accepted.

Not everyone has welcomed the corner though. Some have accused it of diluting the revolution, of reducing it to a kind of theater, while nationalist groups have taken exception to anything connected to the flamingos, screaming “we are eagles!” (Albania is literally called “land of the eagles” in Albanian, and its flag features a double-headed black eagle.) On particularly busy days, Kaso and other volunteers have had to form human chains to stop the surging crowds from accidentally trampling the children. But each time there has been a confrontation or danger, the corner community of flamingos and parents have collectively stepped in to diffuse it.

After some 60 days of continuous protest, featuring many hundreds of thousands of Albanians packed within a few square blocks, there has been remarkably little violence. Some eggs were thrown at the cars of politicians as they entered the nearby parliament building, and some windows were broken at a local police station after six egg-throwers were pepper-sprayed, arrested and held there before being released. 

With the help of art materials and studio space from NGOs and private donors, many hundreds of pink foam flamingo banners have been produced and handed out. In the city, they’ve started to function like a pride flag, a marker stuck outside bars and cafés to show solidarity with the revolution. “Most of the time we connect revolution to war and destruction and going back,” Kaso said, “but this is a big lesson for us about how we can think about a revolution. And the children are the most important part to teach us this.”

Corporate aggression backfires

Besjana Guri is tired. She started our interview by getting a date wrong by a decade and then laughing. The environmental activist has attended every day of the revolution so far, using a projector to screen rousing flamingo-themed videos on the wall of the prime minister’s office. “If you ever think of not going once, you feel you are betraying the protest. You have to go,” she said.

Guri co-led the award-winning campaign that turned the river Vjosa into a national park, and a year ago she founded Lumi (which means river in Albanian), a small organization focused on empowering women and children to protect their local environment. Two days before the Vjosa’s delta was turned into a construction site, Guri had been meeting with women in the nearby village of Zvërnec to discuss the threat to the region and organize a response.

The delta region where the Vjosa River meets the Adriatic Sea is mesmerizingly beautiful — a delicate tapestry of salt marshes, lagoons and forests. Known as Vjosa-Narta, the government awarded the coastal area full protection status in 2017. But over the last decade, as Prime Minister Edi Rama has cemented his grip over Albania’s politics, that protection has been stripped back and caveated to the point of being meaningless. 

In 2018, Vjosa-Narta’s protected status was downgraded to allow an old military base within it to become a (still unfinished) airport. “The airport was the tip of the iceberg,” said Xhemal Xherri, a project manager at Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, or PPNEA. “We always knew that somehow this airport would bring resorts to the area.”

Then in 2024, the law enforcing the protection was amended to allow the government to essentially overrule it if an opportunity was lucrative enough. A month later, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the U.S. president, shared designs on Instagram for a huge luxury development along the coastline. Then in January of this year, the villagers in Zvërnec found themselves under virtual house arrest while Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, toured the area with a troupe of architects, business associates and security guards.

But when the trucks rolled into Vjosa-Narta in late April, it was still a shock. Albanian law required public consultations, an environmental assessment and various government permits to be awarded before construction could begin. The law no longer appeared to matter. Within a week, a coalition of environmental organizations had sent representatives to document the damage as access roads were crudely carved into the pristine coastline. A week after that came the first protest. 

By the time Guri and a hundred other activists and villagers had converged on the vast construction site, it had been enclosed by a fence which ran right into the sea. Watching them from the other side of the fence was one elderly security guard, and a few bored police officers. The men eventually agreed to open a gate and let the protesters inspect some of the damage. “They thought we were just ecoactivists, we were harmless,” Guri remembered.

Before the protest finished, some villagers insisted on toppling over a small section of the fence — a symbol of their disgust. For them, this was not just about land destruction but land ownership. Their community had lived on this coast for generations, yet the land had been sold to Kushner by a Florida-based real estate mogul with links to cocaine-trafficking and document forgery. Some families had spent 20 years in court battling over the ownership of the land, and despite there being no legal resolution, they were suddenly being denied access to it. For now though, the fence was flimsy. It could be pushed over using body weight alone. 

When the protesters returned the next Saturday, the fence and the whole mood was different. Now the barrier was concrete-based, and topped with thick curls of barbed wire. Looking through it were dozens of muscular private security guards, dressed all in black, faces obscured by sunglasses, baseball caps and masks. As the protesters marched along the fence they were shadowed by a column of police officers. “The feeling was not good,” Guri said. “It felt like there were terrorists here, people who wanted to scare and intimidate us.”

It was during the protest on the third Saturday that the intimidation turned to violence. The protesters had marched along the barrier to the beach, and with the tide low, an area of sand had been exposed that was blocked only by barbed wire. A lone villager ignored the warnings of the guards and carefully stepped over it. He was instantly pounced upon by the men in black, who wrestled him to the ground, punched him in the face and dragged him away by his arms across the beach. Another masked guard then fired pepper spray into the angry crowd, blinding both the protesters and the strangely passive line of police officers between them.

Guri was not able to attend the protest that day, but like hundreds of thousands of others, she watched a video of the assault on social media a few hours later. “Everyone that saw that moment, it was really a feeling that they were the ones being dragged,” she said, her eyes closed. Online, the video was being paired with rallying songs and nationalist poetry, and it was spreading like wildfire, well beyond the networks of activists, artists and villagers who were attending the protests. By the next day, a poster was circulating alongside it, headlined “Albania is not for sale!” It called for a protest in Tirana’s central square at 6 p.m. that evening.

Kaso arrived at the protest early so he could take photographs as people arrived. “I was physically trembling when I saw this huge group of people approaching,” he recalled. “It was amazing. A mix of responsibility and euphoria. A feeling that another chapter is coming. I never imagined all these years of fighting for nature and the river could be so helpful.” Guri was late, after spending her Sunday in a village outside Tirana, then hitting heavy traffic. “When I got there, I saw — I cannot count how many people. But for sure 600 people and more. I haven’t seen a bigger protest in the last 10 years for an environmental issue,” she said.

Guri was so inspired she later spoke to the crowd: “I said it took us 10 years to protect the Vjosa river and finalize the national park, but if we continue like this, we will only need 10 days to cancel this project and save the Narta.” With the speeches wrapped up, and the protest coming to an end, a chant built up among the crowd: “See you tomorrow, tomorrow more.” The template for a revolution had been set. 

“The protest kept growing every day. For the first few weeks it was only growing. Not only ecoactivists but all types of people. And the majority was young people,” Guri said. “They came with banners and funny memes and interesting quotes. Then we added the element of the flamingos. That’s when the creativity began, and the creativity has really kept this protest alive.”

Building an anti-corruption revolution

Xhemal Xherri of PPNEA, along with all the activists I’ve spoken to, is adamant that the Flamingo Revolution has no leaders, that it is a spontaneous and amorphous movement featuring a patchwork of groups unified by a love of nature. The closest it comes to forming an agenda is when the crowd cheers or jeers after a speech. But PPNEA has been quietly instrumental in preparing the soil from which this revolution has bloomed, and building the relationships that could lead to its eventual success.

PPNEA was the country’s first environmental organization, established as it was transitioning away from communist dictatorship in 1991. The group took the government to court over irregularities in the airport construction contracts (the case is ongoing), and has been organizing protests against the exploitation of Vjosa-Narta for years. As Albania’s politicians were voting in the law change that meant Kushner’s luxury resorts could turn from CGI dream to reality, a hundred PPNEA activists were protesting outside parliament to condemn them.

The day before the first protest outside the construction site, for which PPNEA brought in bus-loads of Tirana-based activists, the organization invited a delegation of EU diplomats to witness the destruction firsthand. A month later, a PPNEA representative was in Strasbourg, France as the European Parliament voted in a resolution condemning the change to Albania’s law on protected areas, and making its repeal a non-negotiable condition of Albania’s accession to the EU. 

Six Green members of the European Parliament then attended the protests in Tirana at the end of June, making stridently pro-revolution speeches that were adored by the crowds. Just days earlier, Prime Minister Rama had explained to a Euronews journalist how officials in his government were “fanatics of the EU faith” who would do “whatever it takes” to gain membership. The country has been seeking candidature and tirelessly negotiating its way into the bloc since 2009. 

Despite this powerful endorsement from the EU, the fanatical Rama has not softened his stance on the protesters. From the beginning he has dismissed their concerns as delusional, the product of a coordinated online disinformation campaign by Iran, which he claims has simultaneously targeted both Albania and Israel as the two countries deepen their diplomatic ties.

But for Xherri, the reason social media algorithms have been promoting the Flamingo Revolution is not because of foreign interference, but simply because everybody in the capital is going to the square and posting about it. This includes many Albanian social media influencers, who have been privately requesting briefings from PPNEA on Vjosa-Narta, and amplifying the organization’s posts to new audiences.

Construction of the resort has been quietly paused, and the barbed wire fence has been removed, but so far the government has conceded nothing. Even if Rama were to repeal the law change that triggered this revolt, and consign Kushner’s project to the dustbin of history, it is unlikely to be enough to placate the people now surging through the city every evening. As the crowds have grown, so too have their demands. Today the protesters are just as likely to chant for both Rama and the leader of the opposition to be put in jail for corruption, as they are to call for nature to be protected. 

Over the last few weeks, the numbers out protesting have stabilized, with a few thousand marching each week night, and the crowds ballooning again at the weekends, especially now that Albania’s sizable diaspora is returning to be a part of the revolution. The activists I talk to are all confident that the government will eventually yield, and the law will be repealed. 

But when it comes to winning wider political changes, Kaso references a so far isolated incident, early in the revolution, where a group of protesters spontaneously marched out of the city and blocked a highway leading to the country’s main airport for several hours. 

“The people have shown the prime minister how this protest can be escalated. Maybe one or two hundred people, which is nothing for this protest, could block the entrance of the highway which connects the city to the airport, and stay there for 24 hours, which is going to be a big loss for travel companies,” he said. “​​I don’t want to see everything escalate in a dangerous way, but if necessary we don’t only have to be creative in aesthetic ways — with posters and colors and children. We can do it in other ways.”

For now though, the flamingo group are continuing to power this protest with pink placards, good vibes and children drawing their favorite birds. And no matter what happens next, Kaso is happy. “For me the revolution has already been successful,” he said. “It’s already changed a lot. If tomorrow we are not going in the road anymore, I know very well that life in Albania is not going to be the same.”

This article How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/08/albania-flamingo-revolution-creativity-children-vibes/