Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [233]
Poor little Albania, with such powerful enemies and so few friends. It had almost no industry, little trade, no railways at all and only about two hundred miles of paved road. Albania emerged just before the war, created out of four districts of the Ottoman empire. Few outsiders ever visited it; little was known about its history or its people. Only rarely had Albanians—the great Roman emperors Diocletian and Constantine, for example—popped up in Europe’s history. According to some, the Albanians were the original Illyrian inhabitants of the Balkans, who had been pushed into the poorest and most inaccessible parts by the slow sweep south and west of the Slavs. Certainly their language was different from those of their Montenegrin, Serbian and Greek neighbors. In the Ottoman empire, they were valued for their fighting abilities and their beauty.
History and geography—the tangle of mountains and valleys that stretched inland from the coast—had produced a myriad of tribes, equally suspicious of outsiders and each other. The Gegs of the north and the Tosks of the south spoke different dialects and had different customs. As elsewhere in the Balkans, the past had left in its wake religious divisions; the 70 percent of the population that was Muslim was part Sunni and part Shia; a minority were dervishes. The Christian minority was Catholic in the north and Orthodox in the south. Rules about honor and shame, of a dazzling complexity, governed daily life. In some areas, one man in five died in a blood feud.
The rare travelers who made their way into Albania by foot or on horseback tended to fall in love with the land and its people. Byron had had himself painted in Albanian costume; perhaps inevitably, he also took an Albanian mistress. At the end of the nineteenth century, the journalist Edith Durham went there on the advice of her doctor. He had told her travel was good for the nerves, but Albania was not what he had in mind. She explored the country from end to end before the war, usually on her own or with a single servant. The Albanians did not know what to make of this strange dumpy creature; in the end, they decided to treat her as an honorary man. When British soldiers were moving through eastern Albania during the war, they found that if they said “Durr-ham,” it acted as a passport. 31
When Durham first encountered Albania, national feelings were stirring. An Austrian professor assembled an Albanian dictionary and grammar; this convinced literate Albanians that they might indeed be a people. After much discussion the Latin alphabet was chosen in preference to Greek or Arabic characters. Albanian books were published; folktales, histories, poetry. Albanian schools were opened, often surreptitiously. As long as Turkish rule remained relatively light, many Albanians were content to work for the Ottomans, as soldiers or administrators. When the Young Turks tried to reinvigorate the Ottoman empire just before the Great War, their heavy-handed repression provided the missing stimulus; nationalist uprisings broke out, with freedom from the Ottomans their goal. The large Albanian community abroad lent its enthusiastic support.
Independence became a matter of national survival in 1912, when it looked as if Albania’s neighbors—Greece and Serbia prominent among them—were about to drive the Ottomans out of Europe altogether and divide up the spoils of war. This did not suit the Great Powers, who feared yet another war in the Balkans; so, in 1913, they created Albania. Its boundaries were drawn by an international commission, to the accompaniment of objections from the Serbs and the Greeks. When the commission visited southern Albania, a sharp-eyed journalist noticed the same people coming out