Archive for the ‘albania’ Category
Montenegro, Crna Gora, may well be the most beautiful land in Europe. Everywhere you encounter startling and dramatic natural landscapes. Furthermore, with the exception of certain stretches of coastline which have been despoiled by development – by ugly and insensitive recent hotel and villa building – and the sprawl around the capital Podgorica (late Titograd), the built environment is of great attractiveness and interest.
A journey south-eastwards on the southern side of Lake Skadar is a lovely illustration of this. As you leave the lakeside village of Virpazar where the Crnojević river enters the lake, the road starts to ascend and wind its way slowly up the mountainside; these hairpin bends continue as the narrow road pursues its path high above the lake through rocky terrain and ancient chestnut forests towards the Albanian border.
From the start one can see the old Serbian Orthodox monasteries on the islands which dot the lake margin on this side – Manastir Starčevo, Beška, Moračnik. The siting of monasteries on these rocky outcrops would have served two purposes – both a spiritual retreat from the secular world, and a hope of protection from the periodic threat of the Turks. Tiny single-cell Orthodox or Catholic churches are to be found around the Montenegrin villages on this side of the lake, frequently planted on the tops of peaks or in otherwise seemingly barely accessible defensive and visually arresting positions – every one demands a photograph. As you continue south-eastwards, in the distance across the lake on the Albanian side one can see the city of Shkodër, while here in Montenegro churches start to be interspersed with the modest mosques and delicate white minarets of the local Albanians; soon, these start to be preponderant. The villages of the Rumija mountains that overlook the stillness of Skadar Lake are little more than hamlets, yet each one, Christian or Muslim, has its own rightness and sense of belonging to the landscape.
It is with disappointment that the journey ends; a viewpoint is reached near the international border with Albania, after which the road turns sharply back on itself and heads inland towards Vladimir and ultimately the port of Ulcinj.
The modest population of this corner of Europe has survived the centuries in situ, eking out a slight existence and a still essentially unchanged way of life, despite the modern horrors of politics and nationalism. Some villagers will have made their way out, maybe to other parts of the former Yugoslavia, or across the border into Albania, or to find work in Germany, or perhaps even to USA. Bluebird Research can undertake professional family history research across Montenegro but, if we are honest, we do not expect ever to have a case from Rumija and perhaps that is how it should be.
In the 1881 census for England, a five year old girl named Flora is to be found residing with three sisters, her mother Sophia and her father, the curate, Samuel Dickson Sandes, at The Rectory in Monewden, Suffolk. The living for the rural parish of St Mary’s was valued at £265 in 1868. The National Archives’ handy currency converter tells us that this sum would be worth about £12,110 in today’s money – not much but then it was a small and obscure parish. By the time of the 1891 census, the family has moved a little cross-county to The Rectory in Marlesford.
At the next decennial census in 1901, the family is living in suburbia, at St Paul’s Road, Thornton Heath, Surrey. Rev Sandes, now 78, is recorded as “living on own means”, so one assumes that he has retired from the curacy of Anglican souls. Flora is still at home, a 25 year old spinster, described, like her sister Fanny, as a correspondent. In 1911, the most recent census of England & Wales currently publicly available, the family is still at St Paul’s Road. By this date the Rev Sandes, aged 88, is describing himself as a “retired parson and barrister”. He may have become curmudgeonly with age, or perhaps was registering a minor objection to the exclusion of women from the franchise (in tune with the “No Vote, No Census” protest): either way, the census return, which is neatly completed in most respects, records against the Ages of Females simply “full” against his daughter Flora and the other women in the house (excepting his wife Sophia, who is an acknowledged 78). The census enumerator, one William Warman, has pencilled in the remarks “will not give ages” and “refuses to give ages and any further information”, his irritation almost audible.
And as for Flora herself, the column Personal Occupation says: None. Yet five years later Flora Sandes was a Captain in the Serbian Army.
Flora volunteered for overseas service immediately upon the outbreak of WW1 in August 1914. She was rejected by the Volunteer Aid Detachment but got in to the American Mabel Grujić’s Red Cross Unit on a temporary three-month stint and headed to Serbia. She then returned home to fund-raise before returning in 1915 to join the Serbian Red Cross. She served in Niš, caught typhus in Valjevo, was attached to the Serbian Second Army, and worked as a medical orderly in Salonica and Monastir before making the transition from nurse to soldier. Commissioned as an army officer, she fought at Kajmakčalan before accompanying the retreating Serbs on their long winter march across Albania to safety in Corfu and Bizerte (Tunisia).
After the War, Flora Sandes lived in Yugoslavia and married a White Russian officer named Judenič (later imprisoned and killed by the Nazis), before returning to England in her sixties.
Flora Sandes was one of hundreds of British women who volunteered and served as nurses in Serbia during WW1, at places such as Kragujevac, Mladenovac and Valjevo. Some served under the aegis of the Red Cross, others as part of the independent Scottish Women’s Hospital for Foreign Service. Most came from relatively comfortable and privileged backgrounds and the contrast between their early life experiences and those of the war must have been acute and unimaginable.
For those researching an ancestor or family member who was one of those women, there is a significant collection of records in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London.
Mary Edith Durham was born in 1863, the eldest child of parents Arthur and Mary Durham. Her father, originally from Northampton, was a consulting surgeon in London. In the English decennial census returns, the family can be seen living comfortably, replete with domestic servants, at 82 Brook Street in the West End (in 1871, 1881 and 1891) and later at 20 Ellerdale Road in Hampstead (1901). Miss Durham received a private education before studying art at the Royal Academy (she is described as “artist, painter” in the 1891 census return) and then caring for her widowed mother.
Miss Durham’s life abruptly took an unexpected course in the early 1900s, when she undertook a trip along the Dalmatian coast to Boka Kotorska in what is today Montenegro. Here she discovered a lifelong passion for the southern Balkans, initially all-embracing but gradually developing into partisan advocacy for the Albanians. She wrote many books and articles about Albania, Montenegro and Serbia, ranging from travel to anthropology to politics.
In August 1931 she published a short piece called “Preservation of Pedigrees and Commemoration of Ancestors in Montenegro”, on the subject of ancestral awareness.
She recalled firstly how she had attended a Montenegrin Orthodox church service on All Souls’ Saturday (Zadušna Subota) at which the members of the congregation handed the priest a list of the names of deceased ancestors to be remembered and prayed for. Durham called the list a čitulja, which means obituary but in this context more accurately a necrolog (a list of names of the dead to be commemorated). This custom was found among the Montenegrins and Hercegovinians but, she wrote, not among the Serbs.
She then goes on to write:
“In the Northern tribes of Albania, all the men know their pedigrees – or knew them when I was there. I did not know then that the pedigrees were of any value, or I could have collected plenty. They go back mostly to thirteen or fourteen generations. Owing to early marriage, generations are rather short… In this district – and formerly in Montenegro – knowledge of pedigree is most important to prevent the possibility of committing incest by intermarrying with someone descended from the same ancestor. I expect that that was at first the sole object of preserving these pedigrees, and that praying for the names therein was a later and Christian idea… When I was in Njeguši in Montenegro, I was told of a couple who were just about to be married… The young man was from Bosnia. At the eleventh hour it was discovered he was her second cousin, his grandfather having emigrated. The match was at once broken off, and the girl was married against her will to another man, and the unlucky bridegroom left the country. I expressed sympathy with, and sorrow for, the couple. My informants were astounded: “On the contrary, we should be thankful the family had been saved from incest. We saw how necessary it is to keep pedigrees.””
These pedigrees, which appear to have been written rather than oral, were unlikely to comprise full reliable dates of birth, marriage and death, and were more likely a list showing the male line(s) of descent from an original paterfamilias. Even so, 13 or 14 generations is impressive: assuming 20 years per generation and dating from 1915, it means that the Albanians in questions may have had a record of their ancestors going back to the mid-17th Century.
During the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia – the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Salonika – was a region experiencing great tension and flux. There was only a finite quantity of cultivable land, creating unemployment and under-employment and a movement of the landless to the towns. At the same time there was growing social unrest. Competing nationalist movements sought the allegiance of the population. Violence flared up, especially after Ilinden in 1903, and villages were razed and their inhabitants killed or made homeless.
Against this background, emigration became an increasingly attractive option. This was particularly so as the rural population of Macedonia already had a well-established tradition of seasonal migration: migrant workers, usually younger men, worked elsewhere within the Ottoman Empire, usually over the summer, and then returned to their home villages each year. Therefore, emigration to America was seen as a logical extension of a customary practice.
The numbers of emigrants taking the American option rose in the 1900s as push-factors in Macedonia increased. From modest beginnings – for example, 1,529 in 1903 – the number of emigrants to USA rose rapidly, peaking at 20,769 in 1907 and then, after a temporary drop caused by official attempts to stem the flow, increasing again to 18,405 in 1910. USA received a total of 108,323 immigrants from Turkey-in-Europe over the period from 1903 to 1912. Most of these headed to work in mines and factories in places such as St Louis.
However, the term “immigrants” is slightly misleading. Many of the Macedonians heading to the US regarded themselves as temporary migrants, working and saving for maybe three years in America and then returning home to Macedonia. Moreover, many of the immigrants counted in the official figures given above were repeat migrants. In other words, they travelled to USA, returned to Macedonia, and then returned for a second spell in USA. Of course, a significant number of Macedonians did not return to Europe at all, or returned to Europe but them emigrated permanently to settle in US, or had intended to return home but never did due to the outbreak of WW1.
This explains why it is not unusual for an American family historian with Macedonian roots to find their ancestor on incoming passenger lists arriving at East Coast ports on two or more occasions.
Examining the passenger lists, the family historian will also notice that, as likely as not, the immigrant ancestor did not sail from a port such as Piraeus or Salonika (Thessalonika) close to home. International shipping firms such as the British Cunard Line opened branches in Florina, Koritsa (Korçë), Monastir (Bitola), Resen and other towns, which in turn operated through a network of local agents (often money-lenders providing tickets on credit), selling a passage from ports such as Southampton in England, Le Havre in France, Antwerp in Belgium, and Hamburg and Bremerhaven in Germany. The migrants usually reached these departure ports by rail, crossing the continent, often in groups of relatives and friends from the same or neighbouring villages. Just as a majority of the traditional seasonal migrants were young men, so the typical Macedonian immigrant in USA was a single man in his twenties or thirties, with a rural background; very few travelled with wives and fewer still with children. Perhaps three quarters or more of the immigrants from Ottoman Macedonia were Slavic (that is to say, Macedonian or Bulgarian: national affiliations were not necessarily fully formed at that date), the remainder being ethnic Albanians, Greeks, Jews, Vlachs and others.
For the English-speaking family historian with roots in an Eastern European country, reading English-language travelogues from the past is one way to develop a better understanding of the old country. True, travelogues view a country from a single perspective only, that of the privileged outsider who, on his or her travels, is unlikely to see or experience the country as a native does. Nevertheless, I believe there is much to be gained from historical travel writing and particular from reading a number of books so as to seek a more rounded composite picture of how a place seemed.
Unfortunately, with some exceptions, more recent travel writers rarely seem to be successful in capturing a country. They may be too self-regarding, or unconsciously supercilious, or concerned to avoid seriousness, so that they fall into the category of the ephemeral and lightweight.
There is only a modest literature in English on the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, so I approached Christopher Deliso’s “Hidden Macedonia: The Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa” (Haus, 2007) with some excitement. Deliso is an American living in Skopje, married to a Macedonian; his travelogue covers his clockwise trip around the lakes of Prespa and Ohrid, through Greece, Albania and of course Macedonia itself.
It is probably accurate to say that I was disappointed by the book but, also, that I understood it and found it interesting despite itself. There are facets of the book which are not pleasing: the casual jibes at poor Albanians and their recent history, seemingly in the hope of raising an easy laugh; the over-intrusive self of the author; the way the book loses momentum midway and starts to peter out in an uncertainty as to its purpose and its audience. The author is described as having read Byzantine Studies at Oxford; it is right that a writer wears his or her learning lightly, but little learning makes it through to this book, which is a shame.
But still, the book catches something of the truth of the place. I can say this with confidence, even without having visited Macedonia. I have travelled in neighbouring Serbia and Bulgaria and I have seen equivalents of some of the things Deliso describes. More than anything else I think I can sense and respect Deliso’s feeling for Macedonia. There is something compelling about the Balkans, something very attractive; and something not at all what you would think if you relied solely on the media’s perennial accounts of the region (a subject superbly dismantled by Maria Todorova in “Imagining the Balkans”), in fact, quite the opposite. It is the humanity of the people and their way of life. To which one should add the roughness and variety of the natural settings of the Balkans, and the beauty of the Orthodox monasteries and churches, and mosques, in that setting. Finally, of course, countries such as Macedonia have yet to be smothered by the blandness of corporate capitalism and the homogenising spirit of the European Union. For the next 10 or 25 years, they will preserve that particularity which makes them fascinating to someone like Deliso or, for example, Alan Grant, whose Balkanology website better illustrates the compelling draw of the region than anything I could write. I am conscious that, if you are from Western Europe, part of this power is the otherness of the Balkans and that this exoticising of the Balkans is something Todorova also addresses in her work; but it also seems to me that the otherness is real and that recognising and valuing it is a valid experience for a person born and raised somewhere in Australia, Britain or North America.
So read Deliso’s book if you can, accept its limitations, and, if you have roots in this particular corner of the Balkans, try to get out there to see it for yourself.
The Ottomans conceptualised the population of their empire as three basic communities: the Muslims, the non-Muslim inhabitants and the foreigners (or Franks). In turn, the non-Muslims were divided by religion into the millets.
This view of the population informed the arrangements made to measure and monitor the people. Only Muslims could serve in the army. Their Christian and Jewish neighbours instead had to pay a kind of poll tax called the cizye or jizye, later replaced by the bedelât-ı askeriye, literally a tax in lieu of military service. The early 19th century Ottoman censuses were designed primarily to capture the necessary information to enable the state to conscript Muslim men into the army and to levy taxes upon the non-Muslims. Over the course of the century, the Ottomans endeavoured periodically to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their data, so as to boost army and reserve sizes and to maximise tax revenues.
Only males were counted in the census before reforms in 1878, as only males were liable to military service and taxation.
The Ottoman censuses were not defined regular (for instance, decennial) events taking place over a single night or weekend, unlike most of those in places like Britain and America. Rather, they tended to extend over two years and frequently longer. In due course, the census and civil registration functions merged into a single continuous ongoing recording of the population – the basis of this can be said to have been largely achieved by the mid- or late 1880s. This system was also joined up with the military, so that the army had a continuous feed of information for conscripting men into active service, the reserve and the local militia.
From the late 1850s, the census was also used to produce the equivalent of ID cards. The earliest of these was the vergi nüfus tezkeresi or population tax certificate issued to males, which recorded the holder’s obligations to the state, such as their tax liability.
From about 1878, this was replaced by nüfus tezkeresi or population certificate. This served for ID and had to be used in all interactions with the state and for travel purposes. The information on this population certificate was an extract from the sicil-ı nüfus, or nüfus defter, being the actual population registers created and maintained by the state. Muslims and non-Muslims were enumerated in separate registers. The registers included women for the first time. The register included name, age, place of birth, marital condition, religion, occupation, address and military status. Nickname and, in case of adult males, style of beard or moustache were also recorded for purposes of identification. Along side the population registers, a system of notifying and registering births, marriages, divorces, deaths and change of address was also implemented.
Between 1878 and 1885, the new system was gradually rolled out across much of the Empire. Provinces in Turkey-in-Europe which were not immediately covered included the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Shkodër, plus Bosnia, Bulgaria, Crete, Cyprus, Hercegovina and the autonomous Eastern Rumelia. However, the Aegean, Constantinople, Danube, Edirne, Janina and Salonica provinces were covered, plus Ionia and all of western and central Asia Minor.
Finally, new regulations came into force between 1900 and 1902 that mandated the requirement to carry and present one’s population certificate. In due course, this was documenting so much information about the bearer that it became an ID booklet rather than card, known as the nüfus hüviyet cüzdanı or simply nüfus cüzdanı and still used in Turkey today.
Of course, an increasing numbers of Ottoman-born subjects of empire acquired, for protection or advantage, European passports. For instance, the Greek state was happy to assign Greek citizenship to all Greeks living beyond its borders who applied.
Albania was never part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but one of the most useful genealogical sources for Albanian family history is a census conducted and preserved by the Austrians. This took place in March 1918, during the Austrian military occupation of the country in WW1.
Not all of the country was under Austrian control at that time; areas to the south of the river Vjosë were under Italian occupation and the census was not extended to such parts of the country. This means that towns such as Gjirokastër, Sarandë and Vlorë were excluded. Unfortunately, also, census returns for some districts of the Austrian-controlled area of Albania have been lost: this mostly affects the vicinity of Berat, Fier and Lushnjë. All that survives for these areas is statistical information.
However, censuses survive for the majority of the northern and central regions of Albania, including such key communities as the port of Durrës, Elbasan, the predominantly Roman Catholic town of Shkodër and the capital Tiranë. A total of 435,075 individuals are enumerated in these bilingual (Albanian and German language) surviving census enumeration books.
The census is superbly detailed. As well as the usual census data such as administrative geography and address, the information captured for each individual in every household included their name, relation to head, sex, age, place of birth, usual abode, occupation, religion, nationality, literacy in the Latin and Turkish alphabets, and so on.
An especially interesting feature of the census is the evidence of polygyny. Monogamous marriage was enforced by the state in 1928; or, rather, future polygamous unions were made illegal, as existing marriages were not affected. Until then, it was not unusual for Albanian men to take two or very rarely three concurrent wives. It should be stressed that this was culturally acceptable in both Christian and Muslim societies in Albania, albeit far more common in Muslim. It was predominantly a feature of rural villages (especially in the northern mountains) and was only very rarely encountered in towns. Academics working with the data contained within the 1918 Albanian census have calculated that 4.9% of Albanian marriages extant in March 1918 were polygamous. This figure is recognised as an under-estimate of the total proportion of polygynous marriages, as it excludes those marriages in which either the man or the woman had died before 1918 (and it should be noted that the percentage of widows in the census is very high).
Where a man has two wives, these are marked in the census as Frau I and Frau II and ordered by seniority. Invariably, the first wife was the elder of the two: the average age difference between the two women or co-wives (known as shemra in Albanian) was seven years but sometimes it was as great as 35 years. Second wives were taken for various reasons. The usually accepted reason was the childlessness of the first wife; or, given the widespread cultural son preference, the “sonlessness” of that marriage. However, another reason for a householder to take a younger second wife was to secure extra household labour, especially where the first wife was in declining health or the couple had no live-in daughter-in-law. Two other reasons have been offered, namely the levirate (where a widow marries a brother of her late husband) and the sororate (where a woman marries the widower of her late sister, for instance to look after young children) but of course both of these practices would require the man to already have a first wife and therefore probably contribute only slightly to the overall proportion of polygynous marriages. Finally, a head of a household may simply have taken a second younger wife because he could.
The feature of polygyny in Albanian society can have repercussions for a family historian working with the 1918 census, as it can lead to uncertainty as to the true maternity of a child: even if only one wife is named in the census, the possibility of one or more of the children in the household being the issue of a now deceased wife cannot always be eliminated.
Occasionally in the 1918 census you will come across a head of household with two mothers, Mutter I and Mutter II. This points to a scenario in which the head’s father died at some date before 1918 but was survived by two co-wives. Of course, only one is the actual birth mother of the late head’s son, now in 1918 the new head of household. However, once again, it is not necessarily apparent which Mutter is the true mother and which a kind of step-mother.
The Albanian census also confirms the reports of 19th century travellers and anthropologists in the region regarding age at marriage. These reports speak of child betrothal and of grooms being 15 years and brides as young as 12 or 13 years old. Although it is clear that these ages were not the averages but those at the lowest end of a range, very young brides were not unusual and a 13-year old co-wife in a polygynous marriage has been noted. However, Albanian society was already changing, more typical ages for groom and bride were 29 and 18 years respectively, and perhaps a more notable feature is the disparity in age between bride and groom – averaging at 11 years for a first marriage. The communists banned what they regarded as under-age marriage after WW2 and it is unlikely that Albania today displays ages at marriage much different from those anywhere else in Europe.
The Aromanians are one of the most fascinating of the various transnational minority groups in the Balkans. In the context of the region known as Macedonia and now subdivided between the nation states of Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, this people tends to be called the Vlachs or Koutsovlachs but they are known by, and call themselves by, a number of different names, many geographically determined.
One reason for this is the nature of their traditional way of life, which was transhumance. Transhumant shepherds would migrate seasonally between summer and winter grazing lands, often significant distances apart, following the same droving routes between highland and lowland each year. They paid little regard to political boundaries, unless forced, and therefore the geographical space they occupied was greater than their numerical population might suggest (even though it is thought that there could well have been 500,000 Aromanians across the Balkans on the eve of the First World War).
Individual branches of Aromanians tended to be known by the names of the mountain ranges where they grazed their flocks in summer. For example, on the territory of modern Greece, those Aromanians frequenting the pastures of the Gramos mountain range in summer were known as the Gramostani and those on the Pindus Mountains as the Pindusteani.
By no means all Aromanians in this region practised transhumance. Many in fact were merchants and, indeed, part of the local elite in towns and larger villages, for example in what is now Florina prefecture in northern Greece abutting the border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The whole geographical region of Macedonia was ethnically mixed and polyglot and therefore the Aromanians, whether shepherds or merchants, were likely to speak one or more of the local Slavic vernaculars and/or Greek and Turkish as well as Aromanian. Certainly, the urban Aromanians were Greek-speaking and of the Orthodox religion and increasingly identified themselves with the Greek nation state, although those who did not – and there were not a few of these – emigrated to Romania (particularly to Dobruja) and beyond to Australia and North America.
Despite the processes of assimilation, there are still 20,000 or more Aromanians in Greece, with typical Vlach villages including Nymfaio (known as Nevesca in Aromanian) in Florina prefecture and Perivoli and Pisoderi in Grevena prefecture.
Researching Aromanian family history is likely to be challenging, at least beyond 1913 (when Epirus and Macedonia were incorporated into Greece). Many families were mobile across what are now international frontiers and many adjusted their surnames to suit the prevailing winds of politics (for instance, commonly changing the suffix at the end of their name from -ović to -ov to -ovski). However, with these caveats, Bluebird Research would be delighted to assist you with genealogical research into Vlach ancestors in northern Greece. Please contact us for a free assessment.
Stara Serbia, Old Serbia, was the unliberated rump of the country left behind inside the Ottoman Empire after the core of continental Serbia – the Principality or free Serbia – gained its independence from the Turks. While the Serbs and other Slavs referred to the region by this name, the Turks referred to it as Arnavutluk, on account of its Albanian (in Turkish, Arnaout or Arnaut) inhabitants.
The heartlands of Stara Serbia were Kosovo and Metohija, respectively regarded as the battlefield and the garden of Serbia. But Serbian settlement in the region has ebbed and flowed with political events, and from time to time during the Ottoman era, such as in 1690, there would be a mass exodus of the population northwards to safer parts of Turkey-in-Europe and beyond the Dunav (Danube) to Banat and elsewhere in the Austrian Empire. The times of Serbian emigration would coincide with times of Albanian immigration, so that the balance of the population in Old Serbia could swing over the course of the centuries, with an Albanian majority at times and a Serbian at others.
There was not a simple Muslim versus Orthodox Christian opposition, however, as a significant number of the Albanians, who in these parts were Ghegs, were Roman Catholic and referred to as Latins (and, indeed, some of them, members of the Klementi tribe, are thought to have fled north with their fellow Christian Serbs when Islamic rule became too oppressive). Of course, many Catholic Albanians converted to Islam over time. Again, as in other places and other contexts within the Ottoman Empire, we read of the Albanian Latins being torn between two faiths and cultures, trying “to bridge over the passage between the two creeds by adopting Mahommedan names, and thus passing for Mussulmans abroad, while they remain Christians at home” (G Muir Mackenzie & A P Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, Daldy Isbister & Co, 1877).
Of course, too, those Serbs locally who converted to Islam out of conviction, or for advantage, or for a quiet life, tended to assimilate with the Albanian population and would be regarded henceforth as Arnaouts (just as they became Muslim Bosniaks in Bosnia).
The Serbs of Old Serbia have always been in a double bind when not in a position of ascendancy. On the one hand, there is a pressure upon them to get out, applied by the majority Albanian population and inevitably internalised by the Serbs as a wish to escape from their invidious minority position and to be able to live in peace elsewhere. On the other hand, Serbs do not want to abandon their historic Stara Serbia: the more Serbs leave it, the fewer claims they will have upon it. This is the reason why Serbian governments have periodically encouraged return migration to and colonisation of Old Serbia.
Today the Albanians are usually thought of as Muslims, particularly since the Kosovar Albanians have increasingly asserted their Islamic identity against the Orthodox Serbs. However, there are still areas of Albania itself which are Christian rather than Muslim and, indeed, the Albanians have not always been wedded to one faith or another.
“Throughout their turbulent history, Albanians had shifted with relative ease from one religion to another: Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim according to momentary interest. During the late middle ages, their country had become the battlefield between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East: whenever the West was advancing, the Albanian feudal lords – often followed by their populations – espoused Catholicism; whenever Byzantium was the victor and the West retreated, they embraced Orthodoxy.”
Miranda Vickers, The Albanians, LB Tauris, 1999
This pragmatism or expediency seems a clear response to survival needs. During the long centuries of Ottoman rule, Albanians were inclined to convert to Islam, which held distinct advantages.
“The majority of converts, however, were men, whilst women often retained their Christian beliefs even when married to Muslims, and were a factor in maintaining goodwill between the members of the two faiths. At various times, whole villages voluntarily renounced the religion of their forefathers for political advantage…. To make their already difficult lives easier, therefore, many Albanians gradually adopted at least the outer signs of the Islamic faith, thus obtaining such privileges as the right to bear arms.”
Vickers also quotes JC Hobhouse’s A Journey Through Albania of 1809:
“These people, living between Christians and Mahomadens, declare that they are utterly unable to judge which religion is best but to be certain of not entirely rejecting the truth, they very prudently follow both. They go to the mosques on Fridays and to the church on Sundays, thus making sure of the protection of the true prophet.”
Historically, it was the Albanian tribes in the north and south of the country which were Christian – for example, the Catholic Hoti and Mirdites in the north and the Orthodox Suliots by the southern border with Greece. Under the militantly atheist Communist regime, of course, religion was discouraged everywhere within the country and anathematised as backward and bourgeois. By 1973, the great majority of churches and mosques had been closed down, some destroyed and some converted to secular and even provocative new uses: the Roman Catholic cathedral of Shën Shtjefnit (St Stephen) in Shkodër (known as Scutari in Italian and generally in the English-speaking world) became a sports centre, while other Church buildings in the city became blocks of flats, warehouses, and a political police HQ. Only the elderly still attended the few remaining church services. Parents were dissuaded from giving their children religious names, while lists of approved secular names were published. Most churches and mosques stayed closed until late in 1989 or 1990, when practising a religion ceased to be an offence.
Ismail Kadare is the only Albanian writer even modestly known in Western Europe. In English, his works tend to reach us through a French translation, meaning that the English translation is another step removed from the original. Doubtless much is lost in the double-translation, including much of the poetry and many of the nuances of the original; however, enough is retained for a reader to be confident that Kadare is a great writer.
Agamemnon’s Daughter is a collection of three short stories. The edition most easily obtained in UK — David Bellos’s translation published by Canongate — is an example of the English language version being a translation from the French. In the second story, “The Blinding Order”, Kadare writes in passing about a pattern in some Albanian families, especially those of some influence within the Ottoman Empire (in which Albanians often occupied high ranks in the army and civil service). His comments may shed light on some of the complexities of Albanian family history research. The subject is a young woman engaged to be married.
“… the family of her future husband, like many households of Albanian descent, had maintained over the generations the custom of including within its bosom members of different, that is to say opposite, faiths. Her [future] father-in-law Aleks Ura, was a Christian, but one of his sons, who had gone into the navy, had been brought up a Muslim; whereas the other, her future husband, remained a Christian…. the brothers of Aleks had followed two different faiths, and… their forebears and ancestors had always done the same… [She herself] had been given “two first names, each from a different religion. So for her first family and close friends she was Marie; for the rest of the world, including her fiancé, she was Miriam.”
The purpose behind the split faith families is protective and pragmatic. During times of religious conflict or repression, one branch of the family may be able to protect and shelter the other of the different confession; even if they cannot, one line of the family should be able to survive to produce future generations.