Albania has long lived in Italy’s shadow

Albanians are descended from the most ancient of European peoples, the Illyrians. The country came into existence only after 1912 with the demise of Ottoman power in Europe. Its first ruler, the glorified Muslim chieftain King Zog, was hounded out by Mussolini when fascist Italy invaded in 1939. (Zog was put up in London for a while at the Ritz.) Five years later the Nazi Germans were expelled by the Albanian resistance fighter Enver Hoxha. Outwardly a Stalinist, the artful Hoxha was a Muslim-born Ottoman dandy figure who terrorized his Balkan fiefdom through retaliatory murders, purges and the trap-door disappearance of class enemies. Albania has long lived in Italy’s shadow. Last week, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was reportedly furious when her plan to send asylum seekers to Albania was blocked by the European Court of Justice, and the immigrants were sent back to Italy from an offshore detention facility. She is unlikely to give up.

I first visited the troubled Balkan outpost in 1988 when Hoxha’s anointed successor, Ramiz Alia, was in charge. The dictator’s widow, Nexhmije Hoxha (the “Lady Macbeth of the Balkans”), was the hidden hand behind the feared Sigurimi secret police. As individual tourists were not allowed in, I went in a group of twenty Friends of the Royal Scottish Academy. Among them was Lady Rosebery (“A countess!” gasped our Albanian guide). At a customs shed on the Yugoslav border one of our party had his beard shaved off, as beards were synonymous with Greek Orthodoxy and banned. 

I returned to Albania recently with my wife on a hiking holiday through the Accursed Mountains that border on to Kosovo and Montenegro. The night before we left, at the Café Oto in London, we saw the composer Dave Smith perform his Albanian Summer fantasia with Jan Steele on saxophone and his wife Janet Sherbourne on piano. The music, hypnotically good, was inflected with the Ottoman folk rhythms that Smith had gathered on visits to the Albanian highlands during Hoxha’s forty-year regime. Our idea was to follow in the footsteps of the Edwardian ethnographer Edith Durham, who in the early 1900s tramped across the highlands in a waterproof Burberry skirt and plaid golf-cap, recording tribal customs. The Albanians were so taken with her and her book High Albania that they crowned her “Queen of the Mountain People.”

From our hotel on Edith Durham Street in the northern Albanian city of Shkoder, we set out for Bajram Curri some thirty miles west of the Serbian border. The countryside was a wild jumble of chestnut forests and moorland tarns. We climbed on up through alpine meadowlands towards Valbona, with the irregular fangs of Mount Shkelzen hazy in the distance. The uplands were busy with excursionists: Albania is the fastest-growing tourist destination in Europe. In the mountain hamlet of Theth we came across a partially ruined refuge tower or kulla. Hardly any of these towers survive in Albania. In pre-communist times they served as sanctuary for Albanians caught up in blood feuds. The Ottoman-era revenge cult of giak per giak — blood for blood — is sanctioned by Albania’s ancient tribal constitution known as the Kanun which the Illyrians codified. Enver Hoxha made a show of outlawing the Kanun as backward Balkan tribalism but it resurfaced briefly after communism collapsed.

On a visit to Theth thirty years ago, I met an old woman who had been betrothed by her father in utero, in accordance with the Kanun. “And now look who I’m stuck with!” she gestured to a sleazy-looking pasha lying in bed with a white skullcap. “Ah, shut up, my dear old thing,” he countered. The great engine of vengeance — the old idea of purification by blood — was the subject of the late Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s novel Broken April. Blood will always be quick on the knife in Albania — and in east London, too. The Albanian gangs who have captured the cocaine market in the UK abide by the Kanun code of besa, the necessity of keeping a promise. Giak per giak ensures gang loyalty.

Albania’s capital, Tirana, is a buzzy place today with a surfeit of bars. Opposite the Hoxhas’ huge empty villa is a KFC takeaway. Hoxha’s children threatened legal action when plans were announced to turn the villa into a Museum of Oppression. Enver and Nexhmije are believed to have owned twenty-five refrigerators, twenty-eight color television sets and nineteen telephone lines. Enver was known for his love of Norman Wisdom films, which cock a snook at factory owners. Not one of his Sigurimi was ever put on trial for torture or other cruelties.

Nexhmije died in 2020 at the age of ninety-nine. I interviewed her when she was under house arrest on corruption charges in Party Villa No. 6 off Tirana’s Boulevard of National Martyrs. Enver’s bronze statue had just been toppled. “That was more painful to me than his actual death,” she said. Nexhmije and her husband executed more than 6,000 Albanian political opponents, jailed around 34,000 (1,000 of whom died) and sent 59,000 into internal exile. Albania under the Hoxhas was a self-immolated model of Stalinist planning.

On our last night in Tirana we dined out on Lake Shkoder carp fish, milk curds and maize bread. The waiter had a beard.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.