Every evening , like clockwork, Arnen Sula wraps up work at his office, collects his drums, and heads to Skanderbeg Square in the Albanian capital of Tirana.
“Eskobari i Ballkanit
O hajduti i buxhetit
Ne nuk ikim pa doreheqje
HEY RAMA, SHPORRU TI TANI!”
(The Escobar of the Balkans!
You budget thief!
We won’t leave until you resign!
HEY RAMA, GET OUT NOW!)
These are lyrics to one of dozens of songs and poems that Sula and fellow demonstrators have chanted every day since June as they march while carrying cutouts of large flamingos.
“It is our take on Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall,’ and we have changed the first few stanzas to make it make sense in the Albanian context,” Sula explains.
The context he’s referring to is a months-long protest against the construction of a luxury resort funded by U.S. President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner that will potentially raze 42 square kilometers (16 square miles) of wetland around the Vjosa Narta river, as well as a proposed development on the 567 hectares (1.8 square miles) of Sazan Island close by.
Skanderbeg Square has been the heart of a movement that has grown steadily and consistently. Every day peaceful demonstrators fill the streets of Tirana with chants and folk songs and march toward the prime minister’s office.
There they are joined by artists who use a projector to broadcast their messages on the facade of the building.
“Initially, we started with a two-part animated video showing the machines and bulldozers working in Vjosa Narta, and the visuals of the flamingos,” says Besjana Guri, environmental activist, Goldman Environmental Prize winner, and founder of a nongovernmental organization called LUMI, which in Albanian means “river.”
The flamingos represent one of hundreds of species of wildlife at risk from the Trump-Kushner development and inspired the name of the movement: the Flamingo Revolution.
Their voices, in unison, echo a collective demand: Save the last wild river of Europe.
“The protest is about opposing one of the huge touristic resorts with a severe ecological footprint that is planned to take place in the middle of one of the most important protected areas for Albania and for Europe,” explains Olsi Nika, environmental biologist and executive director of Eco Albania, an environmental protection organization.
“Well, everything basically,” Nika tells The Revelator.
“We are not talking about just one building here, or one hotel there — although even that is not acceptable. But we are talking about the construction of a new city from scratch that will take place in the middle of a natural, pristine area,” he says.
Few details are available about the project, but according to some of the project renderings briefly published by Affinity Partners, the Kusher-linked investment firm, the Zvërnec Peninsula, which sits right beside the Narta Lagoon, will be home to a 445-hectare (1.7 square miles) luxury resort.
Meanwhile Kusher told The Guardian last year that he planned to “create the ideal resort…a very high-end luxury product” on Sazan Island, an abandoned communist outpost still littered with unexploded ordnance.
Environmentalists familiar with the developments say this involves construction of at least 10,000 units.
“When you imagine this … it involves construction that could take 10-15 years, trucks, bulldozers, with thousands of people working here, excavators digging in protected land, putting concrete,” says Zydjon Vorpsi, project manager at Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania.
“And once it’s operational, it will be a city of thousands of people that will need energy infrastructure, water, asphalt, pavements, lights, waste management — all of which comes at the expense of the wildlife here. We are talking about wiping out nature; we are talking about transforming this very special area completely,” Vorpsi says.
Nearly everyone interviewed for this article echoed the sentiment and called Vjosa Narta — the last free-flowing river in Europe — “very special.”
“The uniqueness of that river is its free-flowingness,” explains Nika. “It flows to the Adriatic, shaping the features of the delta along the way, which is also the only ecologically pristine delta in the entire Mediterranean Basin.”
The delicate ecosystem created where the Vjosa meets the Adriatic Sea on the southern coast of Albania is home to 2,300 species of flora and fauna, including 200 bird species, at least 70 of which are endangered, such as Dalmatian pelicans and stone curlews.
The rare sand dune formation on the coastline, which serves as a nesting spot for sea turtles, has already faced some damage from gravel dumped by excavators, a Birdlife International report noted earlier this year.
“Construction has also blocked one of the two openings connecting the Narta Lagoon to the sea, cutting off tidal exchange with immediate, cascading consequences for fish, birds, and the entire food chain,” the report stated. “Every day the blockage continues, the damage deepens.”
Additionally, the local Indigenous communities living for generations in the region are facing land disputes in part of the project.
“The village nearby does not have drinking water in taps,” Vorpsi says. “But meanwhile, we’re about to build 10,000 more units there, which, of course, will need fresh water that will be sourced from other areas, through pipelines that will add to the damage and destroy another river to feed this area with fresh water.”
But most importantly, Nika says, “This treasure simply does not belong to us alone, but also to Europe, to the world. It’s not only protected by Albanian law, but also has recognition from international treaties and conventions,” he says. “It is recognized as a Ramsar site under the Ramsar Convention and is a candidate for an Emerald Site in accordance with the Bern Convention.” The river also has the potential to be included in Natura 2000, the European Union’s protected sites, if Albania gets membership in the EU.
Albania applied for EU membership in 2009 and was granted candidate status in 2014. However, as protests expand, the EU Commission has indicated that the environmental violations linked to the Trump-Kushner project could risk Albania’s path to join the union.
The history of eco-resistance in Albania is long and complex. With abundant natural resources and an economy that relies heavily on tourism, the debate over protection versus development remains a constant battle.
The race to protect the Vjosa Narta actually started more than a decade ago, Nika says. “The current government, which came to power in 2013, already announced in 2014 its vision to develop the protected areas.” Since then the government has worked to rewrite legal and administrative frameworks to accommodate development.
In 2019 the government announced a full revision of the protected areas in Albania. But this process was rushed, according to Nika.
“Their assessment reduced the areas of protected territories, and one of them was the Vjosa,” he says, adding that in some areas appeared with permissible enclaves “like holes within the protected regimes” such as the Vlora Airport being constructed in the Vjosa region.
“If you exclude a part of a protected region, it still impacts the ecological integrity of the entire area. You cannot build a factory or an airport in the middle of a protected region,” he says.
But through persistent advocacy, environmental activists were able to achieve some success. “We managed to push back on that at least, and all these holes disappeared, with the exception of the airport,” he says.
Then in 2024 the government passed its new Law on Protected Area, “but ironically, it undermined all principles of conservation,” Nika says. “All its content is about how to develop the protected areas, not how to conserve protected areas.”
The new law “said that five-star resorts are allowed even in the national parks and in all protected areas, paving the way for this project, and other ‘tourism of excellence,’ as they call it,” says Vorpsi.
“In the beginning, when this project was announced, Jared Kushner always referred to it as Sazan Island, and never attached Vjosa Narta,” he adds.
Fast forward to April 2026, when environmentalists documented unannounced excavation taking place in the protected areas. Gradually, it became clear that the ongoing construction was linked to the Trump-Kushner project.
“We began protesting the presence of bulldozers and other heavy machinery in the region, which was supposed to be protected land. However, protesters were met with private security guards who used violence to remove them,” Vorpsi says.
A video from May 31 showing a protester being beaten until he fainted and was dragged out went viral across Albanian social media, attracting strong criticism and anger from the public.
“These constructions started without a public hearing, without a permit; they were illegal and criminal,” Vorpsi says. The Albanian anti-corruption prosecutor’s office in Vlora has since opened an investigation into the legality of the project.
Within days, thousands of Albanians took to the streets to demand the end of the Trump-Kusher project. Soon, however, the demonstrations expanded into a call for larger social change, particularly on systemic corruption that allowed billionaires to take advantage of Albania’s resources.
“It started as a protest for the environment and against this project, but it has changed it into something bigger,” Sula says. “It’s about the Narta, but it is also about corruption, the political situation, the theft by the government, the education system, the health care system, and everything else.”
As the movement remains resilient, it’s the music and art that have provided the protesters with the expression to communicate their message to the government and those in power.
In the months since the start of the protest, Guri has brought her projector to the town square nearly every day and used it to broadcast an array of messages onto the government building, sometimes accompanied by an impromptu choir.
“Every day we prepare a combination of elements: memes, messages, graphics, sometimes funny ones, sometimes strong — it’s a daily protest, and this is one way to keep it vivid,” she explains.
Not all songs and poetry recited by the protesters are Western-inspired. Some are derived from the region’s long history of folk music.
“We have collected some 10 old Albanian songs. These are songs all about nature, so they sing about the flowers, the birds, and so on. And we created a band and organized public concerts [at the protest site] of these songs,” Sula says.
Sula works with an organization called Tek Bunkeri that collaborates with rural communities and artists to create campaigns on shared social issues.
Their songs and chants have become something of an anthem for the protests. “We use art to make activism. And in these protests, we are creating the rhythm of the resistance,” he explains.
“Ki kujdes ki kujdes nga flamingot.
Revolucion ne kete shesh dhe ti rreshket.
Nje ze flet Rama ra nga flamingot.
Lumturia e pushtoi kete vend.”
(Watch out, watch out for the flamingos.
Revolution in this square — and you’re slipping.
A voice cries out: Rama fell from the flamingos.
Happiness has taken over this land)
Tek Bunkeri has created an entire playlist of songs, Çel Ensemble, that “explores exploring memory, nature and tradition through sound” to raise awareness on ecological conservation. Using diverse forms of music, from jazz to chambers, the themes run between the topics of rivers, flowers, landscapes, and collective memory.
Music has always been at the heart of Albanian conservation efforts, environmentalists shared. In 2016 a similar movement to protect the Valbona River against hydropower projects that threatened damage to surrounding regions culminated in a protest concert in Valbona valley by Albanian and Kosovan musicians.
Later in 2018 Albanian artists collaborated to produce “Lum Lumi i Lirë!” (Blessed be the free rivers), a song to raise awareness of the need for protection of the Valbona and Vjosa rivers.
One thing that Albanians unanimously told The Revelator is that they feel a strong sense of responsibility for the land they inhabit.
“We do have plenty of protected areas in Albania because simply Albania has a lot to host when it comes to biodiversity and nature. And this is our duty to protect them,” Nika says, embodying the sentiment on the streets of Tirana.
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