IVANKA Trump recently told a podcaster how she “found” Sazan Island off Albania’s southern coast, saying she swam there from a friend’s boat and hiked “barefoot all the way up to the top”.
She must have very tough feet.
The Albanian island – coveted by Trump and her husband Jared Kushner for a luxury hotel and resort development – is clogged with bramble, seeded with mines and so stony that even its beaches, which are covered with pebbles, not sand, are difficult to walk on shoeless.
It is also crawling with snakes, many of them poisonous.
More plausible than Trump’s back-to-nature hiking reverie was her account that she and her companions “were just captivated” by the island’s beauty.
Sazan sits in the clear turquoise waters of the Adriatic Sea and is indeed a captivating place, splashed with bursts of bright pink by wild bougainvillea and scented with pine.
Uninhabited except for a dozen Albanian soldiers confined to ramshackle quarters next to the harbour, it is an oasis of calm entirely free of the noisy restaurants, cafes and rapidly proliferating tourist hotels along the coast of the nearby city of Vlore on the Albanian mainland.
The only sound on Sazan other than the wind blowing in off the sea is the panting of day-trippers from Vlore hiking up the hill, none of them barefoot, and the barking of a black dog kept by the soldiers to keep trespassers away.
But turning Sazan into a high-end resort for wealthy travellers seems a long shot.
A former Italian, Soviet and then Albanian military base, the island has no potable water and is not connected to the electricity grid.
Its waterfront is piled with rusting machinery and abandoned metal contraptions.
Signs posted on trees along island paths warn of land mines.
It is owned by the Albanian state and, according to Albania’s prime minister Edi Rama, is not for sale.
Though it could be available, he said in an interview, for use by Kushner and his partners if a joint venture deal with the government can be worked out.
In recent weeks, amid anti-government protests in Tirana, the Albanian capital, Sazan has been enveloped by a swarm of far-fetched, online conspiracy theories about plans financed by Kushner and Persian Gulf investors for a “new Epstein island”, Israeli settlements, a dumping ground for Palestinians and an apocalypse-proof bunker for billionaires.
Wild stories of what is afoot on the island are hardly new.
In 1950, at the start of the Cold War,
the CIA reported that Sazan had become “the last word of modern Soviet port
construction” with a missile launch site and a base for dozens of Soviet submarines.
In 1959, the CIA’s photographic intelligence agency took a closer look and “found no evidence of a reported submarine base”, according to a declassified secret report.
Kostandin Liko, 70, a retired Albanian naval officer, worked on the island before the 1991 collapse of communism, which had turned Albania into Europe’s poorest and most isolated country.
He said Sazan was always detached from reality, recalling it as an island of relative plenty thanks to its well-stocked shops and low prices – the result of a system of favours designed to keep military personnel loyal to the country’s Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha.
More than 4,000 people – soldiers, naval officers and their families – Liko said, lived there, enjoying comforts far beyond the reach of Albanians struggling to find enough food to eat just 12km away in Vlore.
A 2015 survey of the island commissioned by Conservatoire du Littoral, a French group that works to preserve coastal areas, catalogued Sazan’s extraordinary diversity of plant and bird life but also made clear the island was not an unspoiled Shangri-La.
It reported that decades under military control had left Sazan littered with decaying buildings, concrete bunkers, 62 tonnes of metal and piles of hazardous waste, including asbestos, barrels of toxic chemicals and unexploded ordnance.
Removing all this, the group’s report said, “is very complex and it will require significant amount of work and funding”.
It urged that the island be declared a protected area and opened up to limited “green tourism”, warning that projects
“to create large and intensive tourist development” would badly damage Sazan’s unique ecology.
Exactly what kind of tourism Kushner would like to develop is not known, except that it will cater to the very wealthy.
Early design images he posted on X in 2024 showed what looked like a sci-fi movie set featuring rows of concrete capsules with floor-to-ceiling windows jutting out from a hillside above the sea.
Sazan Real Estate Development LLC, a Kushner-linked company overseeing the project, has drawn up preliminary plans that include an 800-room hotel, a golf course and a casino. But these were all proposed for a second part of the planned resort complex located on the mainland, at Zvernec, not on the island.
The company, in a written response to questions, said the “project remains in the planning and design phase” and that “no conclusions should be drawn from individual consultant tenders or preliminary planning materials”.
Ivanka told the podcaster David Senra that, after first seeing Sazan during a yacht trip around the Mediterranean, “we developed the opportunity to help realise its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful”.
That provoked online mockery from sceptics of the Trump family’s capacity for “restraint and care”.
Liko, the retired naval officer, said he has no problem with Kushner pouring money into Sazan to build a resort “because this is the way the world works under capitalism”.
That view puts him at odds with protesters who gathered in the distant capital to demand that Rama resign over his role in a system they say unfairly favours the rich and well-connected.
“Of course there is no equality, but if we want equality we should go back to communism,” Liko said. “We already tried that,” he added.
Reminders of how that worked out cover the island – thousands of mushroom-shaped concrete bunkers and kilometres of underground tunnels.
They were built as part of a decades-
long drive by Hoxha, Albania’s leader from 1944 until his death in 1985, to secure the country against attack and preserve its do-it-alone ideological purity.
After World War II, Moscow set up a military base on Sazan, prized for its strategic location just 50km from the coast of Italy, a Nato member.
But the Soviets were thrown off the island in 1961 after a rancorous diplomatic and ideological rupture.
Hoxha objected to Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin.
Once the Soviets had gone, Liko recalled, the island was off limits to all foreigners. Even Albanians who wanted to go there, he said, had to pass background checks and prove their loyalty to Hoxha and his idiosyncratic brand of communism.
Today, it is open to anyone who can get there, which requires either renting a speedboat for a 30-minute journey from Vlore or a day-long trip on tourist vessels that stop off briefly at Sazan during meandering tours along the Albanian coast.
Protesters in Tirana have embraced Sazan as a symbol of inalienable and unbroken Albanian sovereignty down the ages.
But with a history that stretches back to ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, the island has been tossed for centuries between different powers – the Ottoman Empire, the Venetians, the British, the
Italians, who occupied it from 1915 until 1943, and then Nazi Germany until 1944.
The island’s only road, a crumbling concrete strip up part of the biggest hill, was built by Italians. So, too, was a defunct electric generating station, now an empty ruin.
The biggest relic of former communist rule is a concrete hall that once housed a cinema and served as a venue for party meetings.
Its walls disintegrating and its cracked floor caked in dirt, the hall looms atop a weed-clogged hill, offering magnificent views of the sea – and bleak reminders of a vanished Stalinist regime that promised equality for all but kept the best vistas – and movies – for itself. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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