The Museum of Secret Surveillance, Albania: The House of Leaves has a grisly past

The mountainous little country looks out to the heel of Italy's boot, and for the last century, has played out as a field for war, foreign occupation and annexation, and the enactment of fantasies of next-level paranoid dictators.

Its capital, Tirana, is a mishmash of architecture ranging from Bronze-age fortress to Ottoman-era mosques and Soviet Brutalist monuments. But the contemporary symbol of Albanian architecture is no skyscraper or soaring minaret: it's its bunkers.

During the Cold War, Communist leader Enver Hoxha went on a 20-year bunker-building spree until the 1980s — some say there are 60,000 around the country, others put an extra zero in that figure. Like the number of goats in the country — who knows?

These grey, concrete domes jut out of Albania's soil in the most unlikely places. I find them on busy street corners, amid mountain pastures, in graveyards and hotel courtyards, in a range of sizes, shelter against a threat that never came. Most are sealed up, some are havens for litters of street puppies and flocks of goats, or make cubbyhouses that are, literally, bullet-proof. I hear some have even morphed into tattoo parlours, barber shops and cafes.

In Tirana, two subterranean bunkers have been transformed into modern art galleries: the Bunk'Art galleries' grey walls are papered with the sepia photographs of citizens murdered by the state. Their silenced eyes look down on me as I descend a long staircase into the underground gallery beneath the Ministry of Internal Affairs, just off the city's vast Skanderbeg Square. Here, a series of damp rooms house tools of torture and surveillance gear. In a dank cell, a sign invites me in to be 'decontaminated'. I decline.

Bunk'Art's rival for the title of Albania's most challenging museum is the House of Leaves: The Museum of Secret Surveillance. To get there, I take a short walk between the chic cafes and shops of Blloku, the former elite neighbourhood of the Albanian politburo.

A sign at the entrance of the pretty mansion sets the tone: "This museum is dedicated to those innocent people who were spied on, arrested, persecuted, convicted and executed during the communist regime."

Once a doctor's surgery then a maternity hospital, the stately building housed the Gestapo through World War II. It was an easy transition to an interrogation and torture centre during the Communist period, which lasted 47 years until 1991.