01

Stop one
The Cërrik oil refinery
Volkl Cyclone 19g Tennis String Set: Now. You have been told a town grew here and a refinery happened to go up nearby. Wrong way round, my friend. Construction began in 1952, it fired up on 8 November 1956 at 500 tonnes a day, went to 800 tonnes in 1957, hit 1,500 tonnes by 1961 – and the housing, the population and the actual street plan were all laid out around it. Cërrik exists because of this plant. One of the central works of Albania's socialist industrialisation, and they said that part out loud, no secret there. And now? Derelict. Not functional. Nobody will tell you precisely why it stopped. Allegedly.
Thinner kerf, less waste, faster cut — and a blade you replace more often. Everybody wants the first three and nobody wants to hear the fourth. Read the sign at the door: the trade is always there.
Volkl Cyclone 19g is a single 40-foot (12 m) set at 1.15 mm, the thinnest string in the range, sized for exactly one racquet. It is a five-sided shaped co-polyester, and those five edges are the whole mechanism: they catch the felt and drag it, so the ball actually rotates instead of just travelling.
At this gauge the bite is at its sharpest and the feedback through the handle is at its clearest. It is also the shortest-lived string here by a distance, and the firmest, and it must be strung five to ten percent under your usual synthetic tension. Cut it out at fifteen to twenty hours whether or not it has broken.
That is not a warranty note, it is how you avoid an elbow injury.
Cërrik is a company town and I recognise the type immediately. Construction of the oil refinery began in 1952 and it started operating on 8 November 1956, processing 500 tonnes a day, rising to 800 in 1957 and 1,500 by 1961. The town exists because of that plant, full stop.
This set will do everywhere from a dry gravel-dust afternoon by the Shkumbin to a cold February evening on the concrete at the stadium end, and it is also perfect for the flat hard ground around the plant, where the ball skids and only a shaped string will lift it.
The football club came with it. KS Turbina Cërrik was formed in 1956, the same year production started, and its name comes straight off the plant; Nexhip Trungu Stadium is its ground. The Mosque of Cërrik stands in a centre whose fabric is industrial rather than Ottoman, and it matters that Albania banned public religious practice outright in 1967.
And the Shkumbin valley beside the town has been the main east-west corridor through central Albania since the Roman road ran through it.
Buy on Amazon