From being one of the least known corners of Europe, Albania has now started to become a tourist destination. Outside travellers had been here and written about the country and its people. Among British travellers, they included Byron early in the 19th Century and Edith Durham a century later. Now, two decades after the end of the isolationist communist regime, the numbers are growing, and the infrastructure is being built.
In the south, Berat and Gjirokaster are both UNESCO protected sites, their fine old cities displaying unique architectural styles. Berat is known as the city of a thousand windows. Looking up from the valley of the Osum River at the Mangalem district, rising up the hillside towards the citadel, it is clear why. Each white-washed building presents a façade of large windows that take up most of its area. Unlike the traditional defensive towers of northern Albania, with their tiny windows, closed against a hostile outside, the houses of Berat appear open to the world. It is a beautiful sight.
The citadel, built along the crest of the hill above Mangalem, is an impressive size. Many outside powers saw the value of the site, which was at different times in the Middle Ages held by Byzantium, Bulgaria and, briefly, Serbia, before finally being taken by the Ottomans. Inside the walls are houses as well as numerous little churches, mostly closed for restoration, and a ruined mosque that once served the Ottoman garrison.
Early in the nineteenth century, Berat was briefly incorporated into the semi-autonomous dominion of Ali Pasha Tepelena, one of the most colourful Albanian rulers of the Ottoman period. Travelling south from Berat, in the town of Tepelana, the home region of Ali Pasha, is a statue of the old man, who died in his 80s, reclining in his oriental robes, his belt stuffed with weapons, white beard flowing across his chest. Born into a powerful family, Ali Pasha’s father was murdered by rivals when he was a teenager. Turning to brigandage, he gradually clawed his way back, in time finding favour with the Ottoman authorities. In 1788, he seized Ioannina, now in north-west Greece, from where he controlled large chunks of Albania and Greece. Finally, this over-mighty and independent ruler came into conflict with the Sultan, and was killed in 1822. Byron visited him at his court in 1809, writing with approval of the Greek cultural revival that he encouraged, and of his renowned bravery, but also of the tyranny and cruelty of his rule.
Ali Pasha’s life illustrates the complex, ambiguous pattern of national and religious affiliation which characterised the Balkans before the advent of modern nation states forced peoples into more homogeneous national territories. An Albanian from Tepelena, as a Muslim and an Ottoman potentate many would have considered him a Turk. Yet the language of his court in Ioannina was Greek.
On the coast, south of the largely Greek speaking town of Himara, is a castle named after Ali Pasha, at a little place called Porto Palermo. Guidebooks often state that the castle was built early in the 19th Century for Ali Pasha’s wife. Others assert that in fact it long pre-dated Ali Pasha, and was probably Venetian. But it was in his territory. Around the fortress are other, more modern fortifications, abandoned and ruined buildings of a communist era military base, and several of Enver Hoxha’s once ubiquitous bunkers squatting around the castle walls. Close by is a submarine base, tunnelled into the rock.
Ali Pasha also added Gjirokaster to his realm, and renovated and extended the fortress there. The fortress was used by both King Zog and Enver Hoxha as a prison for political prisoners. Gjirokaster produced two of the most notable Albanians of the 20th Century, Hoxha and the novelist Ismail Kadare. Gjirokaster too has a very particular architecture. Some of the big stone houses that were once home to extended wealthy families include shaded terraces in between wings on either side, where the families would have spent much of the time during summer. Hoxha’s house burned down in 1916, and on its site there is now a replica of a traditional Gjirokaster house, with its rooms for hospitality, separate rooms for men and women, and windows through which the women could look in on the men, but not vice versa. Here, the guide told me, a bride-to-be could spy on her future husband for the first time.
Gjirokaster contains an ethnic Greek minority, and is considered the centre of the Greek community in Albania. The city, as well as much of what is today southern Albania, was claimed by Greece and occupied by Greek forces during the Balkan Wars and again in the First World War. As the international powers favoured Albania, local Greeks in Gjirokaster proclaimed an Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus, which received international sanction, but did not last long. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference confirmed the region as part of Albania.
Like elsewhere in the Balkans, there was no clean boundary line, with one national group on one side and another on the other. Just as there were Greeks left on the Albanian side of the border, so Albanians, known as the Chams, were left in the northwest corner of Greece. As with other indigenous minorities in Greece, the Chams did not fare well. Having suffered discrimination in the inter-war years, and accused of collaboration with the German and Italian occupiers during the Second World War, the Muslim Chams were expelled from Greece, while the Orthodox Chams were subjected to the same kind of assimilationist pressures imposed on remaining Macedonian and Bulgarian Slavs in Greece.
These issues continue to affect Greek-Albanian relations. Albanians worry that Athens deliberately tries to inflate ethnic Greek numbers in Albania, encouraging Orthodox Albanians to declare themselves as Greeks. A plan to include a question about ethnic affiliation in the census this year for the first time, strongly supported by Greeks, raised fears among Albanians about Greece’s intentions.
And since the end of communist rule in Albania, the descendants of the expelled Chams in Albania have started to raise their voices, demanding the restoration of their lost property rights in Greece. In the past couple of years, the Chams have organised their own political party, the Party for Justice, Integration and Unity (PDIU), which has broadened its message from Cham rights to a wider pan-Albanian nationalism which, if its appeal continues to grow, would be bound to poison relations with neighbouring countries. It is as if the lessons of a decade of ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia have not been learned.
Nevertheless, Greece’s systematic denial of the rights of minorities is a disgrace in an EU country. Athens’s hullabaloo about the rights of Greeks in Albania, a country that has Greek-language schools, dual-language road signs in Greek areas, and which, by comparison with Greece, is almost a model of a country that respects minority rights, cannot elicit much sympathy given Greece’s ill-treatment of the Chams, Macedonians and other minorities in Greece.
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