Beyond Shijak the road goes over the last low hill, and twenty miles of plain lie before it, most sparsely dotted with the great white houses of the beys of central Albania. Against the eastern sky the towering mountains, with their eternal smoke of clouds, catch the last rays of the sun and make magic with it. For an hour the colors shift and change, plum purple, orange gold, mauve and violet and sea green, until at last only a pale gold moon and a silvery star shine in a lemon-yellow sky. And the seven white minarets of Tirana lift above the green of trees.
Dusk was on the plain, and lights were glimmering through little houses here and there, when we came to Tirana. No, the lights do not glimmer through windows; these houses of peasants on the great estates have no windows, as they have no chimneys. The light of the evening fire, built on the earthen floor, shines through walls woven of willow withes, and the smoke seeps through thatched roofs.
Before us twinkled the street lamps of Tirana. These are literally lamps, filled every day with kerosene and set on their poles, to be lighted with a match after the evening call to prayer from the minarets. Our little car passed between low, ghostly white walls, and stopped before the gendarmerie. An officer came out, lifted one of the street lamps from its pole and held it over the car door, the better to see us.
“Long may you live, zonyas!” said he, and, after he had glanced at our passports: “All honor to you. Go on a smooth trail!” And the words rekindled an old hearth fire in my heart. After a year of the bleakness of Europe, I was at home again.
Three days later rifles were crackling, machine guns were ripping out their staccato shots, and we were under fire in the streets of Tirana. It was the rebellion of March, 1922—a strange affair, which I am about to relate. But before it can be understood, Albania itself must be understood, for that crisis and its outcome are incomprehensible, incredible, without their background.
It would be useless, even though it were not dishonest, to claim that I see Albania with impartial eyes. But this should be said: if I feel a fondness for the little country which perhaps obscures clear judgment, that fondness was created by knowing Albania. I came into it, as I have said, rather prejudiced against it than otherwise. I did not intend to stop there; I was persuaded to stay two weeks; and I have twice returned to Albania and will go there again.
Yes, I have become a special pleader for Albania. But I know the country, I speak the language, I have traveled along the northwestern frontier from Lake Scutari to the Dibra, I have spent months with the people of tribes never before visited by a foreigner. And I have yet to read in any American publication a reference to Albania which is accurate. When a writer so well informed as Mr. Lathrop Stoddard refers to Albania as a “land of rugged mountains and equally rugged mountaineers which raises nothing but trouble,” and thinks that its importance in the Balkan problem is due to Italy’s exaggeration of Valona’s military importance; when all American consuls in Europe warn travelers not to go to Albania, a land of brigands; when Albania appears in the newspapers only as a joke or as the scene of another lawless revolution—the few Americans who know Albania do become special pleaders.
There are good reasons for these misconceptions of Albania. For six centuries the Albanians were one of the buried Christian minorities of the Turkish Empire in Europe. Their great men who rose to places of power in the Near East were not known to the outside world as Albanians. Ismail Kemal Bey, Grand Vizier of Turkey, who raised the flag of Albanian independence in 1912; Mehmet Ali, who led the struggle for Egyptian independence in 1811 and founded the dynasty of the Khedives of Egypt; Crispi, the great Italian statesman—these are a few of the Albanians who, having lost their own country, have fought under other banners. When the Albanians of Sicily rose behind Garibaldi and fought for a free and united Italy, they were thought to be Italians. When the Albanians of Epirus fought for the freedom of Greece, they were thought to be Greek. When they fight for the freedom of Turkey, they are thought to be Turks. And—this is of greater importance—when the Albanians rose to fight for the freedom of Albania, they fought behind a curtain of impenetrable silence.
They were surrounded by a battle line. The Slavs were north and east; the Greeks were south; the Italians were west. Albania was cut off from the outside world in 1910; for thirteen years she has been cut off from the world. No telegraph or telephone lines ran from Albania to Europe; no mail got through without censorship, no traveler without passport visé from enemies. Letters for Europe must still go by messenger through Jugo-Slavia, or by Italian steamer to Italian ports. During May and June, 1922, while I was in Tirana, Albania’s communication with Europe was completely closed by the Italians, in retaliation for Albania’s protest against the establishing of Italian post offices in Albanian cities.
Behind this veil of silence, the truth about Albania lies hidden. Only one newspaper correspondent, to my knowledge, has visited Albania in recent years—Mr. Maurer of the Chicago Post. Mr. Kenneth Roberts of the Saturday Evening Post lay for ten days ill in Tirana, left with all haste for Montenegro, and later wrote of Albania—entertainingly. News of Albania bears the date lines of Belgrade, Rome, Athens. Since 1910 it has been as accurate as news of France bearing a Berlin date line. This is only human, for few of us are accurately just to our enemies, and the Hungarian, Austrian, Serbian, Italian, and Greek soldiers who have campaigned in Albania have returned to describe the country as hell with variations. The one European who has spoken to me of the Albanians without horror is a doctor in Budapest. He had worked in Serbia during the war, and there had encountered a terribly wounded Albanian still alive on a battlefield. The doctor bent over him to examine his wounds, and the Albanian bit off the doctor’s little finger.