Nevin and her son Omar posing in front of the family bar in Tirana. Photo: BIRN

De Gusto is a popular bar in the ever-crowded shopping mall just a few metres from the main Skanderbeg Square in Tirana, which attracts its many customers with a broad diversity of products.

Besides a good espresso and cappuccino, and the usual drinks, it also offers traditional Turkish tea, tasty snacks and hookah pipes for smoking flavoured tobacco.

The diversity of the products seems to reflect the rich national background of the bar’s owners; Salim El Sheikh Youssef is a Palestinian, his wife Nivin is a Syrian from the outskirts of Damascus, while their three-month-old boy Omar is an Albanian by birth.

Their love story started during the war in Syria.

Salim, who used to run a car rental company in Homs, finally decided to leave Syria in early 2013, and come to Tirana where his older brother had business ties.

Nivin also left Syria in 2013, when her father advised her to leave Damascus and go to Beirut. There she met Salim, who had come to Lebanon on a business trip. They fell in love and Salim invited Nivin to join him in Tirana and create a new life together.

“I love to travel and when he proposed me to join him in Tirana I said: Why not?” Nivin recalled while puffing on a hookah pipe in their bar.

After moving to Tirana, they opened the bar in September 2014, which since then has attracted a solid number of loyal clients.

“The location is good and we are friendly with our clients. We now have mainly regular ones and the business is going well,” he said.

Two years later, they both say that they feel at home in Tirana, mainly thanks to the fact that they feel that local people respect their culture.

“I feel that culture in Albania has some similarities with our Arab culture. We had an immediate chemistry with the way of life here. People respected and understood us,” Nivin explained.

Salim and Nivin have also started to learn the language and two Albanian waiters employed in their bar help them.

“I chose Albania since for me it was easy to take working documents and build a life with my family as a regular immigrant and not as a liability for the state, as many war refugees are becoming for some European countries,” Salim said.

“We didn’t try at all to seek asylum in a Western European country. I believe that in countries like Sweden or Denmark we would have many cultural difficulties while here we really can express ourselves without being judged,” Nivin added.

In fact, their bar has started becoming a meeting point for immigrants from the Middle East and Arab countries who live and work in Tirana. Arabic, Albanian and English mingle together with the smell of scented tobaccos creating a unique and pleasant environment.

The couple has decided that their son Omar should have Albanian citizenship, which he gained by being born in Tirana.

“We decided that he should be Albanian since we really love the country,” Salim said, then added: “On the other hand, with the Albanian passport, he will never need any visa to travel in Europe.”

While life in Tirana feels good, Nivin says that she feels depressed when thinking about her parents and three sisters who remained stuck in Damascus.

“I’m constantly concerned about their life,” she said. “I talk to them via Internet, though nowadays the service has become very expensive.”

Yet her sorrows were put aside as her son Omar came up to her, dressed in a Santa Claus costume, and sat in her lap. The family quickly moved on to lighter topics, like their preparations for the Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations.