Albania

Eras

• Before Albania, The Illyrians held this coast and its mountains long before there was a country called Albania, trading and fighting with Greek colonies planted at Epidamnos, later Durrës, and at Apollonia, and with the Roman republic that eventually absorbed them. Queen Teuta's wars with Rome, the Via Egnatia driven across the Balkans, and the layered ruins of Butrint, inhabited from prehistory through Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Venetian hands, are what survives of the millennia before the Albanian state.
• Skanderbeg, Gjergj Kastrioti, taken as a hostage to the Ottoman court and returned as its enemy, seized Krujë in 1443 and held off two empires for twenty-five years. The League of Lezhë bound the Albanian lords together in 1444; after his death in 1468 the resistance collapsed within a decade. His birth year is usually given as about 1405 and is genuinely unknowable, no birth records survive for him or his siblings. This facet is both the man and his long afterlife as the national symbol, which is a separate story with its own dates.
• Diaspora, More Albanians live outside the country than in it. The Arbëreshë have been in southern Italy since the fifteenth century, when Skanderbeg's defeat sent them across the Adriatic, and still speak a form of Albanian. Later waves left under the Ottomans, under Zog, and in the 1990s. The best-known Albanian of the twentieth century, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, born in Skopje, known as Mother Teresa, never lived in Albania at all.
• Ottoman Rule, Albanian lords became Ottoman vassals after the Battle of Savra in 1385, and after Skanderbeg the land was ruled from Istanbul for four centuries. It was a period of conversion, of Albanians rising high in the imperial service, and of near-autonomous local rulers, Ali Pasha of Ioannina above all. It also built the towns: Berat and Gjirokastër, both later inscribed by UNESCO, are Ottoman-era architecture still standing and still lived in.
• Becoming a Country, The Rilindja, the national awakening, ran from the League of Prizren in 1878 through the Congress of Manastir in 1908, which settled the Albanian alphabet, to the declaration of independence at Vlorë on 28 November 1912. The flag was raised there on 4 December; the two dates are often conflated. What followed was borders drawn by others at Florence in 1913, a Dutch military mission sent to build a gendarmerie, Prince Wied's six-month principality, the Congress of Lushnjë, and Ahmet Zogu as president and then king.
• Written With Light, Pjetër Marubi, a political exile from Italy, made what is usually called the first photograph taken in Albania in 1858, a portrait of Hamza bey Kazazi. His studio in Shkodër, Dritëshkronja, "written with the light", passed to Kel and then Gegë Marubi and ran for over a century, leaving an archive of somewhere between 150,000 and 500,000 negatives depending on what is being counted. Around it: Kolë Idromeno, painter, photographer and the first Albanian to screen films; Kinostudio "Shqipëria e Re", which made the country's cinema from 1952 to 1992; and Gjon Mili of Korçë, who became one of LIFE's great photographers.
• Besa and the Old Law, The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini codified northern Albanian life for centuries, hospitality, honour, property, and the blood feud, and at its centre stood besa, a word of honour treated as absolute. The same code produced the burrnesha, women who swore to live as men. This facet also holds what UNESCO calls Albanian folk iso-polyphony, proclaimed a Masterpiece in 2005 and inscribed on the Representative List in 2008: two solo voices over a choral drone, whose name comes from the ison of Byzantine chant, and whose Lab and Tosk forms differ in how that drone is sung.
• Mountains and Coast, The Accursed Mountains in the north, the Riviera in the south, and the Vjosa running between them, in 2023 declared Europe's first wild-river national park, undammed along its whole length. Theth and Valbona, long separate parks, were merged in 2022. This facet is the land itself: the coast, the lakes, the high valleys that kept the north beyond the reach of every empire that claimed it.
• War, For thirty years the new country was mostly fought over rather than governed. The Balkan Wars and the long siege of Shkodër ran straight into the First World War, when Austro-Hungarian, Italian, French and Serbian armies all held parts of Albania and the Austro-Hungarian war press office photographed its occupation in remarkable detail. Italy invaded on 7 April 1939, Greece and Italy fought across the southern mountains in 1940–41, German forces took over in 1943, and the partisan war ended with the liberation of Tirana on 17 November 1944. Much of the surviving photography of Albania from these decades was made by the armies occupying it.
• Hoxha, For forty-five years Enver Hoxha governed Albania as the most isolated state in Europe, breaking with Yugoslavia in 1948, the Soviet Union in 1961 and finally China in 1978, until the country stood alone on principle. In 1967 religion was abolished outright and Albania declared itself the world's first atheist state. From 1967 to 1986 the country was bunkered: the famous figure of 750,000 was Hoxha's target, not a count, and the best-evidenced number is 173,371 completed by 1983. The exact total is unknown.
• Emigration, Communism fell between 1990 and 1991, and what followed was not a smooth transition but a decade of leaving and collapse. On 8 August 1991 the freighter Vlora reached Bari carrying some twenty thousand people. In 1997 the pyramid schemes that had swallowed much of the country's savings collapsed, the state lost control of its own armouries, and Albania came close to civil war. In 1999 it took in refugees from Kosovo in numbers that would have strained a far larger country.
• Icons and Monuments, Onufri painted in the sixteenth century in a red whose composition is still argued over, and the icon workshops of Berat and Voskopojë kept working long after the empire around them changed religion. Four hundred years later the state commissioned a different kind of image entirely: Mother Albania standing over the martyrs' cemetery in Tirana, finished in 1971 and dedicated the year after, and the forty-metre mosaic put across the front of the National History Museum in 1981. This facet is the work itself, panels, frescoes, canvases, bronze, and the painted facades that went up when the grey came off.
• What They Wore, The xhubleta is a bell-shaped dress of felted wool that hangs from the shoulders, is made without a waist seam, and was still being woven in the northern highlands when UNESCO placed it on the urgent-safeguarding list in 2022. Against it stand the fustanella of the south, the white felt qeleshe that survived every regime, and bridal silver heavy enough to be counted as a dowry. Much of what survives was photographed by people passing through, travellers, an Austro-Hungarian war press office, Edith Durham in the northern mountains, which is why the clothes are often better recorded than the people wearing them.
• Literature, The first book printed in Albanian is the Meshari of Gjon Buzuku, finished on 12 August 1555, and a single copy survives, in the Vatican Library, missing its first sixteen leaves. The language spent the next three and a half centuries being written in whichever alphabet was to hand until the Congress of Manastir adopted a Latin one in November 1908, a choice a second congress had to cement in 1910. Then came a literature: Naim Frashëri and the Rilindja poets, Fishta's highland epic, Migjeni dead at twenty-six, Musine Kokalari sentenced to thirty years for helping found a party and serving sixteen, and Ismail Kadare, who wrote inside the system and against it for fifty years and was read everywhere else.
• Faith and Feast, Albania is the world headquarters of the Bektashi, a Sufi order whose leader was installed in Tirana on 20 March 1930, and it is also Sunni, Orthodox and Catholic, in a mixture usually described from outside as remarkable and from inside as ordinary. In 1967 the state abolished all of it, closed or destroyed the buildings and became the only country to write the ban into its constitution. On 18 January 1991 some ten thousand people walked into the Et'hem Bey mosque without permission and nobody stopped them. The feasts outlasted the ban, Summer Day on 14 March, Nevruz, the climb up Mount Tomorr in the last week of August, and so did the coffee.
• Music, Two solo voices over a choral drone is the sound Albania is best known for, and it is only part of it. The lahuta, a single-stringed bowed fiddle, carried the epic songs of the northern highlands for centuries, and the two-stringed çifteli carried everything else. Under the state, song was organised: Radio Tirana broadcast it, the Gjirokastër folklore festival gathered it every few years, and Festivali i Këngës ran from 1962 as the country's song contest. Its eleventh edition, in December 1972, was condemned the following year as too Western, Todi Lubonja and Fadil Paçrami were purged in 1973, and Paçrami was arrested in 1975 and sentenced to twenty-five years. What came after all of it is a diaspora pop industry loud enough to be heard from anywhere.
• Tirana, A capital that repainted itself. The mayor who ordered the grey blocks covered in colour, the illegal buildings cleared from the river and the stadium, the station demolished and the boulevard driven over it, the pyramid rebuilt as a youth centre, and the tower they call the Rock going up on Skanderbeg Square.
• Protests, The street as the place where Albanian politics happens. Miners from Bulqizë outside the ministry, thousands on Skanderbeg Square over prices, the fight for public transport passes, the first Pride marches in Tirana, and the crowds that fill the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation.