About Albania

Albania is a small Balkan country, about the size of Maryland, situated just north of Greece and across the Adriatic from Italy. While it has a distinct language and culture, its history is mostly one of hostile occupation. The longest occupation was by the Ottoman Turks, from the late fifteenth century to the early twentieth century. The Ottomans were held at bay by the national hero of Albania, Skanderbeg, who united the tribes of Albania into a fierce army that was heavily outnumbered, yet kept the Turks from taking Albania for over twenty years. Only after his death did the Ottomans finally prevail. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Albania struggled with self government, finally succeeding with a new monarchy in its homegrown Muslim king, King Zog. He ruled successfully from 1928 until the Italian invasion of 1939. Zog took what was basically an area with a group of warring tribes and knitted together a nation with pride in its culture, history and government. He fled to Britain after the Italian invasion. During the World War II, the Italians built lots of infrastructure – roads, ports, railroads, schools and government buildings that are still in use today. The rest of the Balkan Peninsula was occupied by Nazi Germany. With the capitulation of Italy in 1943, the Nazis moved into Albania. Also with the fall of the Italians, the local parties fought each other as well as the Germans. The Royalists wanted to return Zog to the throne. The Partisans were the best organized of the fighters, and leaned towards communism. The Ballists were the least organized and hard to pin down politically. The Partisans, with help from the allies, did the most to rid Albania of the Nazis, who by that time were trying to get back to the European front. Enver Hoxha emerged as the leader of the Partisans and established a Stalinist regime that kept Albania closed off from the west, leaving it mostly unknown to us during the post war period. Hoxha died in 1989, and his communist regime fell two years later. The most visual memory of the communist period are the concrete bunkers situated all over Albania, numbering perhaps as many as 750,000. Once again, after the fall of communism, Albania struggled with self government. Corrupt officials and opportunists ruled the day and a financial crisis led to great unrest in the early nineties. The current parliamentary government is stable and Albania has now joined NATO and has applied for membership in the EU.

The geography of Albania is stunning. The southern coastline is largely undeveloped and features mountains rising 5000 feet out of the sea, with numerous hidden coves and beaches, and the clear, turquoise blue, Ionian Sea. The northern mountains, sometimes called the Albanian Alps, sometimes the Accursed Mountains, are extraordinary snow covered peaks, many unnamed and probably unclimbed, with streams and rivers rushing though. (Albania gets 70% of its electricity from hydro-electric plants on the rivers in the north.) Lake Ohrid, on the eastern border with Macedonia, is the largest fresh water lake in the Balkans, and has a native trout unique to the lake. The Mediterranean climate is mild, with hot, dry summers and cool wet winters.

For those thinking of visiting Albania, the Bradt Guide to Albania, by Gillian Gloyer, is an excellent source of information. Since we started our project back in 2002, we have seen many changes to the infrastructure of Albania, making it much more travel friendly. There is a new airport, a fine new road from the airport to Tirana, and good roads linking the major cities. Hotels and restaurants outside of Tirana may not be up to the standards westerners are used to, but the hospitality and friendliness of the Albanian people more than makes up for that.

The Albanians by Miranda Vickers is an excellent history of this country, and Albania At War, by Bernd Fischer is a scholarly history of Albania during World War II. High Albania by Edith Durham is an amazing story, well told, of a rather unorthodox British Victorian woman, who devoted herself to the study of the Balkans. She spent parts of 1908 and 1909 walking or riding a donkey through the mostly unknown highlands of northern Albania. She traveled with a single trusted translator and then trusted her well being to the hospitality of the Albanians, who were rumored to be complete barbarians. She found something different entirely. While Albania has seen huge changes in the last 100 years, Durham's willingness to go to difficult places and take whatever she found there at face value is not unlike the travels of Norman Gershman and Stuart Huck 100 years later. (We usually had soft beds and running water at some point during the day, however.) Albania's greatest living novelist is Ismail Kadare. Broken April tackles the story of the Albanian blood feuds – a northern Albanian custom where blood must be avenged with blood. The notion of Besa is actually a part of this tradition, where blood feuds are suspended during a Besa. It is all set down in the Kanun of Lek, the medieval oral laws of the northern tribes, which codifies everything from how to deal with a stray goat in your garden to the proper way to kill someone in a blood feud. Both are given equal weight.