Understanding Albania

From Skanderbeg to Dua Lipa

Skanderbeg (c.1405-1468), Albanian national hero who rebelled against the Ottoman Empire.

Albanians are good at crime, or so the stereotype goes. We’re never in the news for anything good, but it is a reputation we have earned, and we do not really care as long as it isn’t slander. Clear-cut cocaine, Martin Shkreli, Viagra, and worldie news anchors. Some truly great exports. An Albanian gang member travelling from Sweden to a warzone in Iraq to eliminate his rival? Some call it crime — I call it walking in the footsteps of Alexander. Let us talk about Albania.

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Land of the Tall, Land of the White

Albanians trace their origins from the Ancient Illyrians, a fact that isn’t disputed by any academic worth their salt — the Serbian and Greek Orthodox churches only deny this because their founding mythos depends on eroding any notion that Albanians exist. Illyrians spanned the length of the Balkan Peninsula, and it is from the Albanoi, an Illyrian tribe described by Ptolemy, that Albania derives its current name from. The existence of another region named ‘Albania’ in the Caucasus is commonly used by Serb propagandists to paint Albanians as migrants from Azerbaijan. This is, of course, false. For one, Albanians themselves call their country Shqipëri, itself a possible deformation of ‘Epirus’, or of the Scirtari tribe. In fact, the term ‘Albanoi’ is derived from the Proto-Indo-European pronunciation of the word for ‘fertile grounds’, as the central Albania where the Albanoi resided provided excellent pasture land. Latin provides a twofold definition of Albania: ‘land of the tall’, and ‘land of the white’. Both these definitions lend themselves to the mountainous terrain that covers most of Albania, and both are derived from the pre-Indo-European term alb, meaning ‘hill’.

That an ‘Albania’ also exists in the Eastern Caucasus was simply the result of the Romans being lazy with their nomenclature. In any case, I have yet to see Serbs accuse the Scottish of being from Asia because they call their land ‘Albany’; or the Romanians of being from Denmark, because the Romans also called that land ‘Dacia’.

The true autonym for Albania has always been Arben/Arber/Arbon, first noted by the Greek historian Polybius (c.200 BC — 118 BC). The first Albanian state was called this, and so were subsequent states. In Greece they’re called the ‘Arvanites’, because they inexplicably replaced their /b/ sound with a /v/, and in Italy the large community of Albanians who fled the Ottoman invasions still call themselves the ‘Arbereshe’.

Albania gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, after a series of Balkan wars and revolts made the Ottoman governance and occupation of Albania completely untenable. Albania as we know it, however, is not the first distinct polity governed for and by Albanians. The region of Albania today was for many centuries a constituency of Rome, from the Republic to the late Palaiologos. The Principality of Arbanon (1190-1255) was the first Albanian state to have some kind of de jure autonomy, then from the Byzantines followed by a succession of Albanian kingdoms that were ruled by local nobility, Serbs, Albanian Byzantine loyalists, and — interestingly — the Capets of France. As a state, it was clearly very much in the mainstream mediaeval European fold. This went beyond mediaeval Albania’s involvement in the events that were taking place in southeastern Europe: it had an organised church, a university, and flourishing coastal trading hubs; the tribal system was slowly being phased out. Durrës, currently Albania’s second most populous city, also served as a beachhead for the Venetian crusaders who would go on to sack Constantinople. This was the beginning of an attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to Latinise the Balkans and align the region with them instead of the Orthodox Church. It is why northwest Albania, spanning from Durrës to Mat, even reaching as far as Kosovo, remains a uniquely Catholic region. This, however, all came to an abrupt halt with the Ottoman conquest of Albania.

It would be impossible to write an article about Albania without demonstrating the treachery of its neighbouring people. The worst excesses of Orthodox Byzantine double-dealing were laid bare by the ensuing Ottoman conquest of Rumelia, what we now call the Balkans. (‘Balkan’ is a Turkish term.) Serbia fell to the Ottomans in the late fourteenth century, well before Albania was fully subjugated, yet they claim the First Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as a pyrrhic victory for the Serbs, despite it being an inconclusive meat grinder. Their entire claim to Kosovo is in fact founded on this battle, to the point they call the region ‘the beating heart of Serbia’. It should be noted that the Christian coalition fighting there wasn’t even majority Serb.

Albanians, tenacious as they always have been, retook their own lands under the leadership of Skanderbeg (Skënderbeu, 1405-1468), an Albanian nobleman who was kidnapped by the Ottomans in his youth. He would rise through the ranks of the Ottoman military aristocracy before betraying them midway through their attempted invasion of Hungary. What followed was the unification of squabbling Albanian principalities and dozens of actual pyrrhic victories under his leadership. Meanwhile, Serbia — then known as the Moravian (later Serbian) Despotate — was busy sending its men to Constantinople to blow up the Theodosian walls. (The defenders of Evropa, apparently.)

The treachery wouldn’t stop there. The Ottoman position in the region was becoming increasingly precarious, and in 1444, Hungary and a coalition of Christian forces had made its way to Kosovo, which was ruled by the same Moravian Despotate — effectively an Ottoman client state — to finally rout the Ottomans. Skanderbeg was due to link up with the armies of John Hunyadi (c.1406-1456), the Crown Prince of Hungary, only to be impeded by Đurađ Branković (1377-1456), the Despot of Serbia. This would prove decisive, and the Christian forces would lose the Second Battle of Kosovo in 1448, thus cementing the Ottoman position in Rumelia. Skanderbeg would go on to ravage Serbia for their betrayal — something Serbs still have grievances about — while also simultaneously claiming that Skanderbeg himself was a Serb. There would be no hope of another crusade to relieve Constantinople — but the FSB told you that Serbs are the defenders of Europe, because they massacred Albanian Muslims in Kosovo twenty-five years ago and ‘removed kebabs’ in Bosnia.

Skanderbeg would mount fierce resistance for the next two decades, with no assurances from the church. It was, however, futile. Albania was finally conquered in 1479, when the strongholds of Krujë and Shkodër fell after a year-long siege. Albanians would pay a heavy price for their resistance. What followed was the massacre of at least one-third of the Albanian population in the lowlands. Widowed Albanian women jumped off the cliffs in Krujë, clutching their children to spare them the ordeal of sexual enslavement. What strangled the idea of nationhood among Albanians most, however, was the ban on the Albanian language in education. Serbian and Greek, by contrast, remained unbanned, thanks to their churches and their willingness to collaborate with the Ottomans. Many aristocratic families and wealthy landowners would be given refuge in Italy — they are the aforementioned Arbereshe, who still retain their ethnic homogeneity and their language to this day. The rest fled to the mountains, re-establishing the clan system, leaving them stuck in time for the next five centuries.

Let it be noted that Albania held out against the Ottomans ninety years longer than Serbia.

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Scratch a Muslim and you’ll find a Catholic; scratch a Catholic and you’ll find a Pagan

Albanians have never been a subjugated people. The land has been conquered, but never its people. Albanians have always self-governed, and have always remained staggeringly immune to proselytisation. St. Paul may have preached in Illyricum, but it would take a millennium for Albanians to convert fully. Conversions to Islam are also a recent development. The sole head of any given household converted to avoid jizya, and thus the nominally Muslim Albanian came into existence. All their descendants claim Islam because their fathers did — nobody in Albania has read the Quran, nor do they pray. Hadiths? Petty legalism for Arabs who got poisoned by pork that they didn’t know how to cook. The word Murrak is Albanian for ‘Moor’, a derogatory term they still use for those who are of a darker complexion.

Albanians, bar Catholics in the northwest, have yet to fully internalise Abrahamic religions to this day. The addage ‘Scratch a Muslim and you’ll find a Catholic’ by esteemed writer Zef Pllumi (1924-2007) — an Albanian Franciscan priest imprisoned for many years by the Hoxha Regime — certainly holds true, but scratch them again, and you will find a pagan. While warring with the Turks, a pre-emptive book of codified laws was put together for Albanians fleeing to the mountains. This is the Kanun (Canon), which is in effect a fusion of biblical and folk customs, so that Albanians could live by a set of laws that was not Shariah. I would go as far as to say that Albania — and certainly Northern Albania — is the last bastion of paganism and antiquity in Europe. Albanians, no matter their supposed faith, all make pilgrimage to St. Anthony’s Church in Laç, a Catholic church. They then also make the journey to Mount Tomorr, a mountain where Albanians of every creed pledge allegiance to the Illyrian god Tomorr, the consort of Dhemeter, and Zojz, the god of thunder, whose name we also used to denote any man more senior than us as well as any god of choice. Abrahamic religions, then, still haven’t fully permeated the Albanian consciousness.

Despite supposedly being a Muslim country, beliefs in the afterlife and hell are the lowest in Europe. At 22%, it is lower than Czechia, Europe’s least religious state. Compare this to Europe’s other majority-Muslim country, Bosnia, where 66% believe in an afterlife. In Turkey it is 92%. Is the Albania the Muslim country that people believe it to be? Clearly not.

The stigma around the dreaded Albanian ‘Mohammedan’ stems from the methodology of Ottoman census data and how it was collected in the nineteenth century. Ethnicity was determined by religion. Anyone who was Christian essentially got labelled a ‘Serb’, or a ‘Greek’, depending on where they were they resided. Any non-Christian was labelled a ‘Turk’. This seems absurd to those from actual, organic nation-states, because clearly your ethnicity doesn’t change with your religion. The consequences for Albanians would be disastrous. Albanians living in the newly formed Greek and Serbian states were filtered. Orthodox Albanians in Greece and Serbia were forced to assimilate — a great shame, given that most of the generals who led Greece to its independence were Albanian. The Orthodox Albanians in Greece (Arvanitas) were assimilated, while those who remained Muslim were massacred or deported to Turkey in exchange for Orthodox Christians from the most desolate backwaters of the Ottoman Empire.

From the independence of Greece and Serbia until the Second World War, Albanians were subject to genocide and forced expulsions at the behest of various Orthodox churches. Albanian imams also share some of the blame. With help from Serbian intelligence, they facilitated the forced migration of Albanian Muslims in southern Serbia and Kosovo to Turkey. These developments simply lend themselves to the idea of an Albanian nation. It should be obvious by now that anyone from any desolate shithole can become a ‘Serb’ if they start believing in their candles and their superstitions. It is Duginism before Dugin. Serbia has become the European front for Russian Eurasianism.

Albanian nationhood is authentic. You can only be Albanian by tracing your ancestry — which every Albanian can do — and knowing the language, which being non-Slavic and the only surviving Paleo-Balkanic language, is highly distinctive. Southern Slavs have been massacring each other because they think that they are different ethnicities. Serbs choose to ethnically cleanse all their neighbours because they genuinely believe you can’t be a Serb if you don’t subscribe to the Orthodox faith. I’d implore anyone to explain the difference between a ‘Bosniak’ and a ‘Serb’ without screeching about scripture. I’ve had some very shameless people tell me they speak Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian, and put this on their LinkedIn. These are six different dialects of the same language. Albanians, whether they live in neighbouring countries or not, and regardless of their claimed religion, know they’re Albanians and know they’re different.

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Albanians in the World

Albanians are people of the sword, and not of the pen, a people who wrote the book on piracy. Illyria and its substituent, Albania, has always been a recruiting ground for unscrupulous hardmen, and the Illyrian province of the Empire could always field the greatest legionnaire division of any Roman province. This was true then, and was also true under the Ottomans. I won’t brag about the number of Illyrian Roman emperors, because we are not the descendants of a lot of them, but we can rightfully claim both Constantine and Justinian. Albanians can also boast the Barbarossa brothers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, pirates-turned-admirals under the Ottomans who laid waste to the Mediterranean and Pope Clement XI. Albanians also nearly seized the southern Balkans under Ali Pasha of Janina (1740-1822). Mehmet Ali Pasha (1769-1849), another Albanian, seized control of Egypt for himself from Napoleon, and held the whip hand from the Levant to Alexandria to Somaliland.

After gaining its independence, Albania was ruled by a monarchy under Ahmed Zogu, or King Zog I (1895-1961). Zog ruled first as Prime Minister from 1922 until 1925, then as President until 1928, and then as King, until was deposed by the Italians in 1939. His son and heir, Leka (1939-2011), was a maverick in his own right, famous for rallying his royal guard to fight for Rhodesia and firing a bazooka out of a plane at Mugabe’s men. Albania had a referendum on the restoration of the monarchy a few years after the collapse of the communist dictatorship in 1990, led by Stalinist hardliner Enver Hoxha (1908-1985) from 1944 to 1985. Hoxha isolated the country from even the People’s Republic of China and North Korea, and spent much of the budget on constructing more than 173,000 bunkers to defend against a potential Yugoslav attack. It seems very likely that Albanians would have favoured the monarchy’s return; however, as noted by foreign observers, the referendum was rigged by ‘the bastard sons of communism’, and thus the country remained a republic, and Leka (who died in 2011) would never become King.

Anti-Albanian sentiment on the right has only come into fruition in the decade or so. This helps lend some credence to the idea that the ‘Alt Right’ was a Russian psyop. Very suddenly, you had a stream of terminally online Twitter users giving their two pence on the Kosovo question; your average ‘MedSupremacistGroyper’ (a Guatemalan living in Houston) began haranguing everyone over who from what ethnicity qualifies as ‘white’. ‘Blood-and-soil’ nationalists in America would start spamming ‘remove kebab’ at a moment's notice, with a bizarre grievance against Bosniaks and Albanians half way across the world manifesting itself out of nothing. This might seem like the trivial foreign policy of a traditional American isolationist, but it is a logical extension of ‘MAGA communism’: third-worldist nonsense about the BRICS and the creation of a multipolar world order. It is Duginism.

Albanian nationalism is, in my view, fundamentally different to that of its neighbours. Albanian Romanticism — or the reawakening — was the collective effort of the Catholic Church in Albania, the diaspora, and anthropologists from Austria, Germany, Britain, and Sweden. Every Albanian knows of Lord Byron, who spent time in Albania, and the Albanophile anthropologist Edith Durham (1863-1944). Nobody in Albania knows of Sheikh Al-Albāni (1914-1999), an Albanian expatriate in Syria and the most prominent Salafi scholar of the twentieth century. It simply cannot be compared to the national liberation movements of the former colonies. It was not founded on resentment, or petty grievances; nor is it simply salad dressing for the ambitions of superpowers. You will have heard of Albanians in Kosovo naming their children after Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. The more scholarly types, however, will name their children ‘Vilson’, after Woodrow Wilson, who secured Albania’s existence after the First World War. It could be said to to be the most firmly pro-American nation on the globe, and this has deeper roots than the Yugoslav Wars.

A lot is said about the British Albanian diaspora, but much of it is half-truths. Suella Braverman put us in the limelight when she denounced the sea-faring Albanians as criminals, rehashing whatever Donald Trump said about Mexicans, but now applied to us. The fabled dinghy-men, however, leave no imprint on British society. And although most Brits cannot find Albania on a map, they remain ardent in their belief that it is a backward Muslim shithole that isn’t even European.

It is for a more serious immigration researcher to investigate the true demographics of the channel crossers. I’ve had Romani and Arabs tell me they were Albanian and Romanian. They, especially the Romani, are not even registered in their home countries. This effectively means that they can arrive in Britain and claim to be Albanian, citing blood feuds, homophobic persecution, and sex trafficking in order to justify their asylum claims. You will have read articles about Albanian sex trafficking, but it is just this: Romani sex workers posing as Albanians because Albania has the strictest prostitution laws in Europe, where escorts can receive a three-year sentence just for working; Albanian fathers will shoot their progeny before they let them work as escorts.

Another reason they might claim to be Albanian is that it would spare them of the threat of any processing in Rwanda. Albanians whose claims were rejected would be put on charter flight back to Tirana, where they could make the journey through Europe once again. The statistics lend themselves to this thesis: Albanians have the lowest asylum acceptance rates, at just 2%, and 79% withdraw their applications before processing. This isn’t to say there are no Albanians crossing the channel, but it is not the golem that Braverman makes it out to be. Many simply disappear and work cash-in-hand construction jobs.

It needs to be made clear that grievances towards Albanians are a red herring. Given that Albanians currently have zero political capital, and indeed never will obtain any, they will constantly be the target of meek right-wingers because it is still politically viable to moan about Albanians on account that they are white Europeans. This was the discourse around Brexit: Tories deluding themselves and everyone else into hating Polish PhD students when they knew that the British public’s real qualm was always with immigration from the third world. Of course, this cannot be expressed, unless you want an Afghan to brick your house. This isn’t to say Albanians are perfect. They are not, but you could import every working-age Albanian male and it still wouldn’t even match the number of migrants who come to Britain in a single year.

Albanians in Britain have never organised politically for any domestic issue in their host nations; nor have the Albanian disapora in any other country, for that matter. They are not subversive. I do not know a single Albanian who votes, and the only reason they’re on the electoral roll in the first place is because their mortgage advisor said it would boost their credit scores.

Back in Albania, parliament has to be barricaded every other week to prevent the entry of our equivalent of a Q patriot. In Kosovo, they have dug deep into their Kosovo Liberation Army toybox, and regularly flush out their parliamentary chambers with tear gas and flares. We are not too far off stun grenades. This is the politics of antiquity; the Homeric ideal. Yes, there was one protest after Cruella called us criminals, but even then, it warped into a social gathering for actual criminals to scout for talent in their German ’22 plates. Albanians simply do not have collective political ambition like many other minorities do. We will not see Albanians in parliament in our lifetimes, though it would be funny to watch Aspana Begum bawling her eyes out when your local Albanian MP lets off a smoke grenade at the reading of the new Racial Equality Act.

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The Albanian Blob

Albanians will, however, engage on the issue of Kosovo, and this leads neatly to Britain’s worst ever export to Albania: the Blob.

Kosovo and Albania house more ‘think tanks’ and NGOs per capita than anywhere in Europe. Imagine a think tank named ‘The European Centre for Economic and Judicial Reform for a Democratic and Free Kosovo in NATO’. Now rearrange these words in as many ways as you can, and you’ve created a dozen or so think tanks already. Add ‘domestic violence’, and you have another half dozen. These institutions will try and recruit just about every Albanian humanities and social sciences student in Europe. For these institutions, a degree from abroad is as good as gold, because it means more funding from the British foreign office and, of course, Uncle Sam (is there anything America won’t fund?).

When you peer into the research they carry out, you find that every policy recommendation amounts to telling the government that they need to spend more money, be nicer to ‘LGB’ people (the acronym still currently stops at ‘B’ in Albania), and that men should stop beating women if we want accession to the EU. Albanophiles like the Austrian businessman, politician, and eccentric Günther Fehlinger offer a far more concrete solution for Albania: join NATO, bomb Belgrade, and balkanise Russia.

So not a lot of money actually goes into research. But where does it all go? Most likely on the booze habit of some nameless pervert in Brussels who hasn’t ever known sobriety. A Central European drunkard gets paid a sizeable fee to give meaningless talks to International Relations graduates who clap like seals, because being told that Albania needs to be less corrupt is profound, apparently. It also funds field trips for these interns to sham gatherings like the ‘World Forum for Democracy’ — effectively just an excuse for obnoxious aspirational diplomats to drift around the EU parliament building and prattle on about Kosovo long enough that they can get a photo with some obscure MEP.

It’s not just British and American tax money being funnelled into worthless Albanian NGOs. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey have also attempted to invest in Albanian mosques in the hopes of getting Albanians to practice Islam. This is another sham. In brief, mosques give handouts to poorer Albanians, as long as they attend lectures about Islam. Women are asked to wear hijabs, and are paid handsomely to do so. This has proven futile, because Albanian women take it off as soon as it’s time to go to the club, where they spend the money they have been given on copious amounts of alcohol. The imam, after a long day of telling the few prayer attendees that Skanderbeg is burning in hell, then heads off to spend most of his money at the bar and gamble away what is left.

This is to be expected when your country underwent a Blairite Revolution of its own. At the helm is failed art student, Edi Rama. The reference to Blairism isn’t merely an analogy: he really did have Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell advising him throughout the late 2010s. Albania went from being a borderline anarcho-capitalist state that registered 6% GDP growth per annum to a continental-style social democratic tyranny with an obsession with ID cards, paperwork, and planning laws.

Until a decade ago it would simply have been the case that you could build your own house or start your own business with no government oversight, so long as you owned the land. Thanks to remittances and money laundering, I estimate that Albania has enough properties to house twenty million people. Indeed, Albania and Kosovo retain the highest rates of home ownership in Europe, at 96 and 98 percent respectively. There are no zoning laws whatsoever: the countryside is littered with three-storey villas surrounded by lush gardens. There will never be a green belt: if they could, Albanians would lather the countryside in concrete; there isn’t a hill, valley, or mountainside they won’t build on. One might say this is all about status, but I believe it to be a genetic predisposition towards a medieval siege mentality. In our hearts we’re still fighting the Turks. This inherent ‘YIMBYism’ is the reason that Albanian cities do not look like termite mounds, unlike most of the settlements you can find in Greece and Turkey. Albanians need space. When they first arrived in Britain, they deemed the country to be far more Soviet than theirs; the terraced housing horrified them. They thought London would be studded with skyscrapers and baroque palaces on every corner, and the pavements lined with gold.

It is the second-generation diaspora who present the biggest problem to both Albania and their host nations. I square the blame firmly on Dua Lipa: Albanian nationalism went Woke when she posted her infamous ‘autochtonous’ image. The mentally ill femcels, the communists, and Romani gypsies with internet access became the standard bearers of Albanian irredentism — or what I call pink nationalism.

The irredentist cause thus went from Anschluss to bog-standard whinging about ‘oppression’ from the West. An unholy coalition of Americanised leftists and indoctrinated Islamists decided that Britain and the Daily Mail were the responsible for every Albanian woe throughout history. They cite the Treaty of London of 1913, which set Albania’s current borders and excluded forty percent of its people. A tragedy in some sense, but it is the only reason Albania is a country, and not a massive conflict zone. Think of the Kurds, who have no state. In any case, Britain was not even a signature to this treaty.

This new angle on Albanian history pretty much mirrors every other ethnic grievance in London: a fusion of Dilly Hussain’s Islamism and female anti-racists who try to reconcile Islam with liberal orthodoxy and the Marxist post-colonial diatribes they launder from the non-Europeans they grew up around. Firstly, you have the Islamist contingent with very primitive ideas of morality. Constant preaching about ‘Western degeneracy’ and LGBT. Morons paraphrasing Andrew Tate and Dilly Hussain tweets, harping on about the woman’s role in the family — in other words, pathetic Muslim Twitter discourse. Some have gone on to compare Albania to Somalia, citing similar attitudes towards homosexuality and ‘family’. A moralistic obsession with gay people and women who wear short skirts only reveals these people’s infantile ideas of what culture actually is. I have even seen some suggest that they would prefer Albania resemble Afghanistan rather than the United States. When you challenge them on this, they automatically start calling you a Nazi.

These people would not find comfort in the Albania of reality. They would be ostracised from Albanian society because they can only find their niche in the ghettos of Bruce Grove and Gascoigne Estate. It has gotten so ridiculous that Albanians, after a long day at the grow house, suddenly decide they are not into alcohol. The only Hadith the women have memorised is some quote about racial equality. Both types hammer on about Palestine.

Of course, if these people really cared about the oppressed beyond virtue signalling to their Mirpuri power league mates, they would volunteer to fight in Ukraine to protect the Albanian community there, whose ancestors fought on both sides of the Russian-Ottoman wars of the eighteenth century. They do not. Going ‘rah we need to unite the Ummah against the yahud’ is far easier than getting blown up fighting over an ice cream shop in Bakhmut. Fortunately, they will all grow out of this once they get office jobs, so it is nothing much worth worrying about.

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Albanians, then, are sword-wielding mavericks who will never subscribe to ideology or bleeding-heart morality. The future of Albanians in Britain really depends on out-marriage, but if history is anything to go by, they will all join a hypothetical military death squad. They will be the first to land in Hong Kong if we ever go to war with China. There will be Albanian settlements in Nizhny Novgorod after they commit unspeakable war crimes. Albanians have no regrets about Corfu. Place them in the Foreign Office, where they can revive the Byzantine dark arts of unscrupulous diplomacy. And drugs? Better Albanians do it than anyone else, because they are not going away. Albanians are good at crime.