Tag Archives: balkans

A taxi in Tirana (Albania) in 1984

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UNTIL EARLY IN THE 1990s, Albania, the small state on the western side of the Balkan peninsular, was at least as tightly sealed-off from the eyes of the outside world as is North Korea today. It was a maverick socialist state, which, under the leadership of its dictator Enver Hoxha, regarded first the USSR and then later the People’s Republic of China, as being too reactionary to be its allies. Few visited it, the only country in Europe where Stalin was publicly revered long after his death, and even fewer escaped from it. And, not many people shared my long fascination with the country.

Central Tirana in 1984

In 1984, when solo travel was forbidden in the country, I joined a group tour to Albania. 28 years later, I was chatting about my experiences on the trip with a dental patient who had migrated from his native land, Albania, to the UK. After telling him some of the strange things that had occurred during my fortnight in Stalinist Albania, he told me that what I had noticed was indeed the case during Hoxha’s dictatorship. He said to me that if he were to relate the conditions that prevailed, nobody would believe him. However, he said, that if I, an outsider, told what I had seen, I would more likely be believed. This conversation led to me writing and publishing an account of what I could recall of my brief sojourn in Albania. This book is called “Albania on my Mind”. It includes my 1984 travelogue as well as what made me become interested in that then almost impenetrable country from the age of about 15. When I published it in 2012, I thought that I had lost the many photographs I took in Hoxha’s Albania, and I illustrated the book with images from out-of-print literature. A few years later, I found the colour pictures I had taken on the trip. Maybe, one day I will bring out a new edition that incorporates my photographs rather than the other images.

During my 1984 trip, our group was watched carefully by our Albanian guides, the coach driver (a party member), and members of the Sigurimi – Albania’s highly effective secret police. And everything we were shown was carefully stage managed so that we were likely to regard Albania as a perfect Socialist paradise. One day, a group of us decided that we would like to hire a taxi in Tirana (the capital) to visit a local beauty spot, Mount Dajti. This is what I wrote about it in my book:–

After we had eaten lunch at the hotel, a group of us went into the square outside it. We saw a long line of taxis, which were waiting vacantly by a booking booth. We wondered how often these were hired and by whom; there was not a soul in sight taking the slightest interest in them.  One of us walked up to the booth and asked the man sitting inside whether we could hire a taxi to take us up to Mount Dajti, some way outside Tirana. Just when it seemed that we had succeeded in hiring a cab, another person inside the booth lifted a telephone receiver, listened for a moment, and then whispered something to the man with whom we had just negotiated. He beckoned to us, and pointed at the hotel. Somehow, he made it clear to us that we needed to book the taxi not from him, but from the hotel reception desk.

We trooped back into the hotel’s lobby and made a beeline for the reception desk. Two suited men, sitting on a sofa nearby, looked at us over the tops of their newspapers. As we reached the desk, I noticed that the doors of one of the hotel’s two lifts were opening. Our (Albanian guide) Eduart hurried through them and towards the receptionist, who was beginning to attend to us.

“What do you need?” Eduart asked us, out of breath.

“We want to hire a taxi.”

“Why?”

“We want to visit Mount Dajti?”

“Why should you do that?”

“We need some fresh country air. We’ve been in the city for too long.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Eduart protested. “You have already spent many days in the countryside.”

“But, that’s what we want, and we believe that the views from Mount Dajti are magnificent.”

“You cannot go.”

“Why ever not?” we asked.

“There is a lot of traffic. The roads are crowded.” We looked at Eduart disbelievingly. Traffic congestion was certainly not a problem in Albania in 1984.

“You know that there’s a big national cycle race on at the moment.”

“That was over long ago,” one of us objected. “We saw the posters announcing it along the roads.”

“You can visit Mother Albania, but no further.”

We had already visited the Mother Albania monument, which was located in the outskirts of the town. However, as we were determined to not to give in to our obstreperous guide, we agreed to his compromise.

“Alright,” we said.

Then, Eduart said menacingly:

“You may take the taxi to Mother Albania, but remember that if anything happens to you, we cannot take any responsibility for your safety. You will not be protected by your group visa.”

“We’ll risk it,” one of us said.

I did not like the threatening sound of Eduart’s voice, but followed the rest of our small group back to the taxi rank. When we arrived there no more that ten minutes after we had left it, we found that all of the taxis had disappeared, and also there was an extremely long line of people waiting in a queue outside the booth.

It seems that while we were arguing with Eduart, a queue had been hastily assembled next to the taxi rank, and it was long enough to put us off the idea of hiring a vehicle.

If you enjoyed this extract and want to read more, “Albania on My Mind” is available from Amazon:

.https://www.amazon.co.uk/Albania-My-Mind-Adam-Yamey/dp/1291111476

A lady from England who saved a nation in the Balkans

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MARY EDITH DURHAM (1863-1944), usually known as ‘Edith Durham’, who is well-known to many Albanians but little-known amongst British people, was a remarkable woman. Trained at Bedford College and the Royal College of Art, she was an accomplished artist, a prolific writer, a skilled anthropologist, and a formidable political lobbyist. On the evening of 14 March 2025, the Embassy of Kosovo in London hosted an event to celebrate the life and achievements of this lady, whose work was of great importance in the Balkans, especially in what is now Albania and Kosovo. It was organised by the Anglo Albanian Association led by its Chairman Stephen Nash and members of the association’s committee. Several speakers gave interesting talks about different aspects of Edith’s life. Between the speakers, the actress and presenter Joanna Lumley read short excerpts from some of the books written by Edith Durham.

In 1900, Edith’s medical advisor suggested that for the good of her health, she should take a break from her busy life in England. She travelled to Montenegro, and thus began her many years of arduous travelling around the Western Balkans, learning about the people who lived there, their traditions and ways of life, their problems, and the complex political situation in the region. The Oxford historian Noel Malcolm was the first speaker. Briefly and succinctly, he gave a comprehensive outline of the complex political situation prevailing in the Balkans when Edith worked there. In a nutshell, the region was the epicentre of the struggle to determine how the Balkan territory was to be divided up as the Ottoman Empire was suffering its death throes.  The translator (of Albanian novels including those of Ismail Kadare, who died in 2024) John Hodgson gave a fascinating talk about his first visits to Kosovo in the early 1980s when many country people were still living the way that they were when Edith Durham visited them before WW1, and then wrote about them in her books.

James Hickson, who is the grand nephew of Edith Durham, gave a fascinating talk about Edith’s family: her parents and her eight siblings, many of whom, like Edith, went on to do remarkable things. Edith was the oldest child, and after her father died, she was left to care for some of the family as well as continuing her work as a successful artist. It was the stress of this overworking that caused her to become so unwell that her doctor recommended she took the holiday, which led to her involvement with the Balkans and the Albanian people, in particular. Wherever she travelled in the Balkans, Edith was welcomed by local people. While staying with them, she observed their customs and all aspects of their daily lives. She was given and purchased many items (clothing, domestic tools, fabrics, and much more), which she brought back to England. Many of these precious mementoes of her trips are housed in two museums: one in the Bankfield Museum in Halifax (Yorkshire), and the other, the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill (London). Rachel Terry of the Bankfield and Peronel Craddock of the Horniman both spoke, and explained how their museums obtained the exhibits collected by Edith Durham, and what items their collections house. Hearing them has made me want to revisit the Horniman, and to pay a first visit to the Bankfield.

Elizabeth Gowing, who has written a very personal account of her ‘discovery’ of Edith Durham after she first visited Kosovo in 2006, also spoke (via a Zoom link from Prishtina) briefly about Edith and how she came across this extraordinary woman. Another speaker was David Oakley-Hill, whose father Dayrell R. Oakley-Hill (1898-1985) played a leading role in running the Gendarmerie of Albania during the reign of King Zog. He lived and worked in the country between 1929 and 1938. His son related that his father and Edith Durham communicated with each other. David is currently completing a book about another formidable English woman, who worked in Albania: Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948). Edith and Margaret wrote letters to each other, and David will be including some of them in his forthcoming book.

I wrote earlier that Edith is far from well-known in Britain. Brian Ferris, another speaker, is valiantly trying to remedy this situation by attempting to get a commemorative plaque attached to a house where Edith lived in London (36 Glenloch Road in Belsize Park). He related the frustrating difficulties that he is facing in trying to achieve this. I have discovered that she also lived, albeit briefly, at two other addresses around Belsize Park (see: https://historywiki.therai.org.uk/index.php?title=Mary_Edith_Durham).

Joanna Lumley read extracts from some of Edith’s books in between the various speakers’ presentations. Most of them came from “High Albania” (first published in 1909), which is, so far, one of the best books that has been written about Albania in English. Before reading the first extract of the evening, she explained that after her first brief visit to Albania, she fell in love with the country. With her readings and the excellent presentations by the various speakers, all introduced by Stephen Nash, the event hosted by His Excellency the Ambassador of Kosova, Ilir Kapiti, was both enjoyable and highly informative. It was a fine appreciation of the woman whose empathy with the Albanians, observations, and political lobbying saved what is now the country of Albania from being carved up by the countries around it and becoming incorporated into them.  

Carpaccio and the Albanian community in Venice

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THE ITALIAN WORD ‘scuola’ (plural: scuole) does not always mean ‘school’ (i.e., an educational establishment). In Venice, there are several scuole, which were never schools, but confraternities (or guilds). Well-known examples of these include the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which contains many fine paintings by Tintoretto (1518-1594), and the Scuola Dalmata dei Santi Giorgio e Trifone, which contains a superb set of paintings by Carpaccio (1465-1525). The latter, also known as the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, was founded by Slavs (‘schiavoni’ in Italian) from Dalmatia (now mainly Croatia).

Another group of migrants from the Balkans, Christian (mostly Catholic) Albanians, began arriving in Venice in the early 15th century, both as traders and refugees from the Ottomans. In 1442, the Albanian community in Venice established its own confraternity, the Scuola di Santa Maria degli Albanesi. The building that housed it from the end of the 15th century still stands on a narrow passageway, the Calle dello Spezier, connecting Campo San Stefano and Campo San Maurizio. During our annual family holidays in Venice in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, we often passed along the passageway whilst walking from the Academia Bridge to Saint Mark’s Square. After my interest in Albania was first kindled in about 1967, I learnt about the Albanian scuola and always felt excited when we walked past its façade decorated with bas-relief stone carvings.

Three of the sculptures, which are affixed above the ground floor windows, depict two saints (Gallo and Mauritius) with the Mother and Child between them. Above them and located between the two second floor windows there is a larger bas-relief. It portrays a scene with two men in turbans standing on a rock facing a high hill on top of which there is a building with two heraldic crests. One of the men is brandishing a curved sword. This scene is a representation of the great Siege of Shkodër (1478-79). The city was then a Venetian possession. One of the men with a turban is a depiction of Mehmed II. The shields on the building and on the top corners of the sculpture were those of the Loredan and Da Lezze families, who were heroes of the siege.

The Albanian community in Venice was quite important during the period of the Venetian Republic, which ended in 1797. Several years ago, I met the Kosovan scholar and diplomat Bejtullah Destani, who told me that the city’s archives contain many documents charting the activities of the Albanians in Venice, and they have yet to be examined in detail.

Like the Scuola Dalmata, the Scuola degli Albanesi was decorated with a series of paintings by Carpaccio. In 1780, the Albanian scuola was closed. Its building became home to a bakers’ confraternity. 28 years later, when Venice was under Napoleonic rule, the other scuole were all suppressed. The Carpaccio paintings have long since been removed from the Albanian scuola, and can be found in museums in Venice, Milan, and Bergamo.

To get some idea of how splendid the Scuola degli Albanesi must have been in its heyday, a visit to the wonderful Scuola Dalmata should do the trick. Even if you have minimal interest in either Albania or Dalmatia, the paintings by Carpaccio make a good reason to visit Venice.

The year Albania proclaimed independence

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IN WARWICK, I chanced upon a fascinating book in a charity shop. It is Part 2 of “Stanley Gibbons Priced Catalogue of Stamps of Foreign Countries 1912”. When it was published, it could be purchased for as little as half a crown (2/6, which is 12.5 pence). I paid a lot more for it, but not an excessive amount.

I felt compelled to buy it because of its date and my interest in Albania. For, on the 28th of November 1912, the independence of Albania was proclaimed in the seaside town of Vlorë. Albania’s independence was formally recognised when the Treaty of London was signed in July 1913. The catalogue I bought in Warwick was published some time in 1912 and most likely before independence was proclaimed. As far as the publishers and the compilers were concerned, what is now Albania was still part of the Ottoman Empire.

The index of the catalogue contains an entry for “Albania (Italian P.O.)”.  This needs some explanation. Throughout the Ottoman Empire, there were postal services operated by foreign (i.e., not Ottoman) countries. A website (www.levantineheritage.com/foreign-post-offices.html) reveals:

“In the 18th century, foreign countries maintained courier services through their official missions in the Empire, to permit transportation of mail between those countries and Constantinople [sic] the Empire capital. Nine countries had negotiated Capitulations or treaties with the Ottomans, which granted various extraterritorial rights in exchange for trade opportunities. Such agreements permitted Russia (1720 & 1783), Austria (1739), France (1812), Great Britain (1832) and Greece (1834), as well as Germany, Italy, Poland, and Romania, to maintain post offices in the Ottoman Empire. Some of these developed into public mail services, used to transmit mail to Europe. The Ottoman Empire itself did not maintain a regular public mail service until 1840, when a service was established between Constantinople and other major cities in the country and this was slow to develop and expand. The gap in this capacity was very much filled with the various foreign post offices which continued functioning right till the beginning of WWI in 1914 …”

Left: Ioannina in the 1970s. Right: examples of over-printing texts

Hence, the entry in the catalogue’s table of contents. I turned to the page listed and found the section on Albania. The Italian Post Offices in the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire issued stamps, to quote the catalogue, which:

“…surcharged or over-printed for use in Italian post offices abroad.”

These stamps were the regular issues but, to quote the catalogue:

“… distinguished by the removal of some details of the design, over-printed with Type…”

Different Italian stamps were overprinted with names of places and a Type number. For example, Italian stamps were over-printed with: “ALBANIA.  10 Para 10. 201” (where ‘10 Para’ is a monetary denomination and ‘201’ is the Type number), or “Durazzo. 4 PIASTRE 4. 205”, or “Valona, or other place names. 10 Para 10. 208”. Durazzo and Valona being the Italian for the Albanian names Durres and Vlore.

Within the Albanian section of the catalogue there is also an illustration of the over-printing “JANINA. 4 Piastre 4. 205”. Janina is the name of a town now in Greece, Ioannina (Ιωάννινα).  In 1912, this town was not in what was then Greece, but in the Pashalik of Janina, part of the Turkish Empire. In February 1913, following the battle of Bizani in the First Balkan War, the town was absorbed into Greece. Many Albanians still consider that by rights Ioannina should be a part of a Greater Albania. The large Albanian population in the town was forcibly reduced by population exchanges in the early 1920s and also the pre-WW2 Greek government’s policy of strongly encouraging people of Albanian ethnicity to regard themselves as Greeks. When I visited Ioannina in the 1970s, there were the remains of Turkish buildings but many of them were in a sad condition. I do not know whether they have been restored since then.

My purchase in Warwick has proved to be of interest. It records the state of postage stamps on the eve of great changes that were about to happen in the Balkan peninsular as well as illustrating aspects of European colonialism, both political and economic.

An Austrian in Albania

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I WISH THAT I had taken a photograph of it when I was visiting Tirana, the capital of Albania, in 1984, the last year of the life of its long term dictator and admirer of Josef Stalin, Enver Hoxha (1908-1965). I managed to get at least one photograph of a statue of Stalin in Albania, the only European country that still displayed monuments to this by then mostly discredited Soviet dictator. However, in May 1984, I failed to take a picture of something I have never seen outside Albania or in Albania when I revisited it in 2016. What I failed to record on film was the sight of men walking along the streets with heads of flowers whose stems they were holding between their teeth. Their lips were hidden behind the blooms. I mentioned seeing this to several people who have visited Albania, and none recall seeing flowers being carried that way. So, I was beginning to wonder whether my memory was playing tricks as time passed.

A few days ago, I was browsing the bookshelves in an Oxfam charity shop when I noticed a travelogue that contained a few pages about the author’s experience of Albania, which he visited several decades before my first encounter with the country. I was thrilled and relieved that my memory had not failed me when I read the following words he wrote:

“The inhabitants of Tirana love music and flowers. You can see men going around with roses in their mouths. They seem to use them as an extra buttonhole.”

These words, translated from German, were published in the “Frankfurter Zeitung”, a German newspaper, on the 29th of June 1927. They were written by its journalist, the Austrian novelist Moses Joseph Roth (1894-1939), better known as ‘Joseph Roth’. The book in which I found his articles on Albania is “The Hotel Years”, edited and translated by Michael Hoffmann and published in 2015. The anthology of Roth’s writings covers countries, to mention a few of them, including Austria, Hungary the USSR, Germany, Yugoslavia, and Albania.

Roth visited Albania in 1927 and published six articles about it between May and July that year. He mentioned the love of music in Tirana. This observation relates to both the mandolins played mainly by Albanians who had unaccountably, in his opinion, returned to their country after having lived abroad, mainly in the USA, and to military bands.  During his sojourn in the capital, he notes the seemingly endless army exercises and parades that are carried out throughout the day.

By Cora Gordon, 1927

With regard to the Albanian army, it was his impression that they were poorly equipped:

“Now the army has Austrian rifles and Italian ammunition, bullets that jam, magazines that can’t be clicked in, British knapsacks that can’t be secured with Italian straps, covers for field-shovels and no field-shovels with which to dig trenches, Italian officers who don’t know commands in Albanian, …”

And, he asks:

“For whom do they exercise? Surely not for their country? Because half the country is unhappy with their government – for reasons of idealism.”

Reading this, made me wonder why Roth was sending reports from Albania between the end of May and the end of July in 1927.  Near the end of his largely unflattering description of the country and its people, he wrote:

“Albania is beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring.”

Although Albania is anything but boring for me, I was curious about its “current topicality” during those months in 1927. Roth’s readers probably knew, but that was long ago.

I looked at various issues of the “Times” newspaper of London and other sources to discover what might have interested the world’s press in Albania at the time that Roth wrote his articles. On Monday, the 6th of June, the Times noted that diplomatic relations between Albania and its neighbour Yugoslavia had broken down. On the 27th of May, Mr Juraskovitch, an interpreter at the Yugoslav legation in Tirana, was arrested and his house was burnt down (www.jstor.org/stable/25638310?seq=1). Naturally, the Yugoslav government objected. On the 31st, Tzena Beg, an Albanian representative in Belgrade, explained to the Yugoslavs that Juraskovitch was an Albanian citizen and that compromising documents had been found in his possession. Mr Sakovitch, the Yugoslav chargé d’affaires, disclaimed all knowledge of this and demanded the release of Juraskovitch. Hussein Beg Vrioni, the Albanian Minister for Foreign Affairs, said that his case was purely an internal matter. On the 4th of June, the Yugoslav legation was withdrawn from Tirana. The following day, the Albanian government declared that it was taking the case to the League of Nations.

On the 5th of June, the “Times” noted that many Albanians feared that this diplomatic incident would create anxiety and unrest in the country, and many felt that the flames were being fanned by a third party with a great interest in Albania, Italy. According to “The Annual Register, Vol. 169- for 1927” Italy had:

“…sent to Berlin, Paris, and London a Note calling attention to alleged preparations on the part of Yugoslavia for an immediate invasion of Albanian territory. The crisis had arisen as the result of the arrest by the Albanian police of a certain Jurascovich, charged with espionage on behalf of the Yugoslav Government. Refusal to release the alleged spy led to the withdrawal of the Yugoslav Minister from Tirana, and to the Italian Note. The matter was, however, satisfactorily settled between Italy and Yugoslavia.”

Eventually in November 1927 after much Italian antagonism to the French and their cordial relations with Yugoslavia:

“ … the Italian Government published the text of an Italo -Albanian Treaty of defensive alliance.”

This was not the first attempt to forge an alliance between Italy and Albania as is illustrated from the following quote from “The Annual Register”:

“Relations with Italy and Albania were disturbed at the end of 1926 by the first Tirana Treaty and became more strained in March, 1927, when the Italian Government addressed a Note to the Great Powers (Germany, Great Britain, and France) accusing Yugoslavia of military preparations against Albania.”

Thus, Albania was being dragged gradually into the strong influence that Italy held on it until the Second World War had begun.

Roth travelled to Albania around about, or just after the Juraskovitch affair had begun. This might have been one reason for his visit. Another thing that might have attracted his attention, which was reported in the “Times” of the 10th of June 1927, was the growing unrest of many Albanians, particularly in the north, resulting from dissatisfaction with the government of Ahmed Zogu. However, by mid-July, a couple of weeks before Roth’s last article about Albania, the two countries, Albania and Yugoslavia, had come to a more or less satisfactory settlement of the Juraskovitch affair.

My surmise is that Roth came to Albania not out of curiosity but in connection with the diplomatic incident and the strained relationship between Albania and its Slav neighbour. My impression is that the urbane Roth cared little for what he observed during his time in Albania. His description of his arrival sets the tone for much that appears in the anthology of his Albanian travel writings:

“ … the hut, like so many attractions these days, has a guest book; sitting over the book is a man in a black uniform, rolling himself a cigarette, and this is the Albanian border police. A master of the alphabet, but unused to writing, he sits there whiling away the time of new arrivals by painstaking scrutiny of their passports … I cut short his study by offering to set down my name for him … Workmen are repairing the road. There are always two hunched over together … they collect little scoops of sand on their tiny shovels or in their bare hands, pour it into scars and potholes, sprinkle a few stones on top … and stamp it down with their bare feet …”

Roth also remarks on the telegraph wires linking Durres with Tirana. They were:

“… strung not on masts, but on crooked trees, which have been lopped and cropped. They used to stand by the wayside, a home to birds … now they are redesignated as telegraph poles … equipped to transmit journalistic reports – the twitterings of political sparrows – to Europe…”

Whereas Roth’s descriptions of Albania in 1927 are hardly flattering to the country, some other travellers, who visited it that year, published a far more flattering account in the same year. The travellers were Jan Gordon (1882-1944) and Cora C Gordon (née Turner;1879-1950), who wrote and illustrated a book called “Two Vagabonds in Albania”. It is amongst the best books I have read about the country. Unlike the critical and disapproving Roth, they take a delight in what they observed and convey that beautifully in their text and the illustrations they created.

Roth would be amazed by the changes that have occurred in Albania since his visit in 1927. I was also staggered by the changes I saw between my first visit in 1984, when I saw men with flowers in their mouths and motorised vehicles were few and far between, and 2016 when Tirana had become a modern city with traffic congestion and tall buildings to rival those found in any of the world’s large cities.

Blinded by Bosnia

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HERE IS A BOOK that provides a fascinating view of the crisis that afflicted Bosnia and its people during the 1990s. It reveals that what happened in that beleaguered part of the Balkans was far from a simple black and white conflict in which Serbians were the villains and the Bosnian Muslims were the innocent victims. It records that often the Bosnian Muslims and their allies behaved far from virtuously. What the book reveals is extremely disturbing and of great relevance today, so many years after the end of fighting in and around Bosnia.

“UNHOLY TERROR” by John Schindler is about the Bosnian crisis in the 1990s and its dangerous consequences. Using his  personal experiences (he was a US spy in the Balkans) and a variety of credible sources, he demonstrates how Bosnia’s post-Communist Muslim government misled the West, and especially the USA, into believing that the Bosnians were fighting the Serbs and Croats to achieve a multi-ethnic non-sectarian state, where all beliefs are tolerated. The author describes that the opposite was true: the Bosnian government was converting Bosnia from a racially and religiously tolerant community to a hard-line fundamentalist Islamic state.

Schindler convincingly demonstrates how the Bosnians hoodwinked the West into believing that it was only the Muslims who were victims of aggression in the fighting following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.  Most in the West, including a former US president, were happy and only too willing to believe that it was the case that the Muslims were being subjected to genocide by the Serbs. Anyone who dared contradict this was ignored and/or ridiculed. Whilst it was true that many Bosnian Muslims were being murdered and otherwise persecuted, Schindler gives evidence that they were not alone: the Serbs, Croats, and moderate (not hard-line or Wahabi) Muslims living in Bosnia received much aggression from the forces under the control of the Government of Bosnia.

The USA and its allies helped the Bosnian Muslims with military matters alongside(!) the Iranians, the Saudis, and other promoters of hard-line Islamism.

This book describes how Muslim fighters, Mujahadin and jihadists, moved into Bosnia (some had been fighting in Afghanistan) to assist their Muslim ‘brothers’ with the struggle. Schindler suggests and gives evidence for these imported fighters’ role in establishing a fundamentalist Muslim state in Bosnia, a state in which Christians and moderate Muslims were treated as hostile.

Bosnia’s wartime president Izetbegovic skilfully hoodwinked the West into believing he was creating a tolerant forward-looking state whilst he was actually creating an Islamic state that adhered to a hard-line form of Islam known as Wahabism.

Following the apparent end of hostilities, Bosnia became home to many determined Jihadists and a nest of terrorists whose activities included likely involvement in the 9-11 attacks in New York City, the Madrid bombings and many other dreadful acts. It appears that many terrorist activities after 1990 can be traced back to Bosnia.

Schindler’s fascinating and highly readable book could well be called “Blinded by Bosnia” because that is precisely what Izetbegovic and his government did to the critical faculties of the USA and its allies. I read this book with great sadness. I was upset to read that a part of the Balkans, which I had grown to like during the 1980s, had been transformed into what Schindler’s book (published 2007) describes as having become a dangerous rogue state after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.

A country that exists no more

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OHR 78 OHRID Sunsetting over Albania

 

The picture depicts the sun setting over Albania as viewed from the Yugoslav shore of Lake Ohrid. When I took the picture, I was standing in Yugoslavia. Now the sun has set forever over Yugoslavia: that country exists no more. What made me interested in Yugoslavia and the Balkans? Here is my reply.

 

Hergé, the Belgian creator of the cartoon character Tintin, must be held responsible for my fascination with the Balkans. From the age of 7, when my father first presented me with one of his books, I became fascinated by the drawings of Syldavia and Borduria in some of the albums. These were two imaginary countries that the Belgian cartoonist invented to depict what he had seen during his visits to the Balkans. They attracted me than all of the other exotic settings of Tintin’s adventures.

My parents were fundamentally opposed to any totalitarian regime, be it right or left wing. They refused to venture behind the so-called Iron Curtain. Furthermore, they were even reluctant to buy anything made there on the basis that any purchase would give financial support to a regime that opposed the capitalist way of life. Their avoidance of countries, which were under the control of communists, and my fascination by Hergé’s cartoon drawings of south-eastern Europe made me yearn to visit them. As soon as I was old enough to travel alone, I gave in to my yearning.

I chose to visit Yugoslavia first for two reasons. First of all, it seemed more accessible than its neighbours; visas were not required and it appeared to have a less oppressive regime than some of the other Balkan countries. Secondly, I was already becoming fascinated by its mysterious neighbour, the tiny hermetically sealed country of Albania. I believed that by visiting certain areas in Yugoslavia I would manage to catch close-up glimpses of this almost completely impenetrable place.

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My early visits to Yugoslavia, which commenced in the late 1960s, were made on my own or with other visitors to the country. These were fascinating enough to make me want to see more, but differed little from simple tourism.  Soon, I began meeting Yugoslavs. Many of them, especially in Belgrade and Sarajevo, became good friends. My visits to their country began to assume more of a social nature than simply touristic. I believe that as the years passed and I made ever more visits, I began to experience the country more profoundly, and with far greater affection, than the average tourist. My book “SCRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ” contains a trail of memories of the experiences I enjoyed whilst visiting a country that no longer exists.

 

“SCRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ”

is available as a paperback: HERE and on Amazon Kindle

 

Postage stamps in Albania

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TIRANA Skand Sq with House of Culture and mosque

 

Recently, I read a blog (Click here) written by an Australian, who has visited North Korea twice. On one of his trips, he visited a museum or exhibition of postage stamps, many of which depict important leaders of the country. Given that it is against the law to deface pictures of these people, he wondered how careful postal officials would have to be when they cancel the stamps with the rubber stamps used for franking. One false move and the great leder’s face might become defaced. In that case, the postal official would risk punishment. This story reminded me of something that I observed in an Albanian post office when I was visting Albania in 1984. In those days, Albania was even more isolated from the outside world than North Korea and it was governed by a stern, repressive regime led by the dictator Enver Hoxha.

This excerpt from my book  Albania on my Mind describes what I saw:

“I wrapped my books into a number of parcels, addressed them, and then began leaving the hotel to visit Tirana’s main post office. The Australian, who was travelling with us, spotted me in the lobby and asked me what I was doing. When I told him, he askedwhether he could accompany me to the post office, as he,working as he did for the Australian postal service, was curious to see how things were done by the Albanian post…

… The clerk behind the counter in the Tirana post office offered no objection to the way that I had packed my parcels. He weighed them and then gave me numerous stamps to stick on them. I stuck them on and returned the parcels one by one. The clerk examined each of them to make sure that I had stuck the right combination of stamps on each packet.

Suddenly, he stopped, looked up at me, then at the parcel, before pointing at one of the stamps. In my haste, I had stuck it on upside down. He tore the stamp off the
parcel, and then replaced it the right way up, pointing at the portrait on it whilst saying:
“Enver Hoxha.”
The Australian, who was watching this with wide-open eyes,
turned to me and said:
“You know, it’s completely illegal to remove stamps from postage. It’s against all international postal rules.”

I did not know what to say, but admired the respect that even a humble postage stamp could inspire in one of Enver’s subjects.”

 

ALBANIA ON MY MIND 

is available

on Amazon by clicking   HERE

Picture shows Skanderbeg Square in Tirana, Albania, in 1984

How China viewed Albania

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HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

Albania is one of the smallest countries in Europe. Between 1944 and late 1990, it was isolated from the rest of the world by a stern dictatorship that held in high regard the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin and his methods of government. In brief, Albania was ruled by a pro-Stalin dictatorship.

The dictatorship, led by Enver Hoxha from 1944 until his death in ’85, had few allies. For a couple of years after 1945, Albania maintained an uneasy friendship with Tito’s Yugoslavia. Then for a longer period, the USSR became its ally and provider of assistance. With Stalin’s death and his replacement by Nikita Krushchev, who denounced Stalin posthumously, Albania rejected the USSR.

For a period between about 1964 and the mid to late 1970s, tiny Albania became closely allied with the enormous Peoples Republic of China. This period included the ten year Chinese Cultural Revolution. Albanians were subjected to Enver Hoxha’s own version of what the Chinese people had to suffer. Eventually, China’s drift away from Albania’s approach to Marxism- Leninism, caused an end to friendship between the two countries.

I have met several retired diplomats who served in China during the period of Sino-Albanian friendship. Their anecdotes make interesting reading.

When I was last in Tirana, I met a retired Albanian diplomat, who had served in China during the years of Sino-Albanian friendship. He said that in those days the Chinese newspapers were full of pictures and articles about Albania. One day, some Chinese people approached him. They told him that because there was so much about Albania in the news, it must surely be a huge country like China!

A retired Indian diplomat, who had served in China during the Cultural Revolution, collected atlases, something that I also enjoy doing. He found a Chinese world atlas and looked for Albania. In this particular atlad, Albania was hidden away near the spine of the book where two pages met. The country was barely visible except by opening the atlas as widely as possible without cracking the spine. When some young Chinese students asked the diplomat to show them Albania in his atlas, they were surprised at its almost hidden representation in the book. They could not believe that their country’s socialist ally in Europe was so tiny and insignificant. Almost immediately, the students began insulting him with phrases like: “capitalist spy”, “imperialist lackey”, and “enemy of the people”. They refused to believe that the country, which was so important to China, was so tiny.

Another retired Indian diplomat, whom I met in India, came up tomeafter I had given a talk about Albania. He told me that he was serving in China when Enver Hoxha sent the open letter declaring that he was terminating the friendship between his country and China. He told me that he was amazed that such a minute nation like Albania had the nerve to throw mud in the face of a major power and ally such as China was and still is.

These anecdotes help illustrate that tiny Albania had a larger than life history during the 20th century.

Two names, one country

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The Albanians now refer to their country as “Shqipëria”. Almost everyone else calls the same country “Albania” or some variant of this.

Here is an interesting article that discusses this difference: http://www.tiranatimes.com/?p=133209

Incidentally, the national symbol of Albania is a two headed eagle. This is appropriate for a country known by two names!