“I cannot think of that man without admiration,” said the doctor, looking thoughtfully at his mutilated hand. “I can’t blame him for this; I had not spoken to him, and he thought I was an enemy. He was a splendid fellow—stood the most frightful agony without a murmur, and kept his spirit like a lion. I did what I could for him—had no hope of saving him—and that night, wounded as he was, he got away. I hope he reached home alive. Some day I’m going to see Albania.”
I spoke of Albanians as a Christian minority in the old Turkish Empire. One of the most frequent errors about Albania is the belief that it is Mohammedan; this report has been used for political propaganda. The Albanians became Christians before the Roman conquest, and were Christians when they were subjugated by Turkey. They remained Christian without exception until after the death of George Kastriotes—known in European history by his Turkish name of Iskander Bey Scanderbeg—who successfully revolted against Turkey and maintained Albanian independence for twenty-five years, defeating the Turks in thirteen great battles and innumerable small ones. After his death in 1467 some of the chiefs of the central mountain tribes, exhausted by a quarter century of war and confronting fresh Turkish armies, purchased their actual independence by a verbal submission and became nominally Mohammedan. When the Bechtaski sect—which may roughly be said to bear the relation to Islam that the Methodist bears to the Church of Rome—rose in Turkey, it found its most fertile ground among these Mohammedan Albanians. The northern mountain tribes have always remained Roman Catholic, and southern Albania Greek Catholic.
None of these creeds, however, have affected national unity—Albania is the only Balkan country in which religion and nationality are not synonymous—and all of them are rooted shallowly above the old religion of Albanians, which is the formless belief in a Great Unknown from which sprang the gods and mythology of ancient Greece. In southern Albania you will still hear the people taking oath per kete djelle eghe per kete hene (by the power of the sun and the moon). You will still hear them calling upon Zeus—Zaa or Zee, the Voice—and upon Athena—E Thana, The Intelligence. In the north, the Catholic mountaineer greets the rising sun with the sign of the cross, and hears in his forests the voices of the ora. This vague religion is unconscious. The Albanian himself does not recognize it, but it is the resisting subsoil which has prevented acknowledged religions from taking deep root. Families of all religions freely intermarry; Mohammedan women are unveiled, or Catholic women veiled, according to the fashion of their town; in the mountains neither are veiled. In Guri-Bardhe, a village of the Mati known as being fanatically Mohammedan, the women were quite willing to pose for photographs, and Limoni, the chief, was defying the local hodji by demanding a modern school; the hodji taught the children nothing worth while, he said. In the spring religious festivals—the two Easters and the fast of Ramazan—all Albanians in Tirana took part, and Mohammedan fezzes were thick in the midnight processions carrying Easter candles.
There has never been friction along the frontiers of the three religions. All Albanians united to resist the Romanizing and Germanizing influence of Catholicism, the attempt of Shiek ul Islam to cripple the Albanian language by a Turkish alphabet (a revolution was fought, and won, for the Latin alphabet in 1910), and the Hellenizing propaganda of certain Orthodox Churchmen.
But there is a real division in Albania. It lies between the Toshks, or southerners, and the Ghegs, who are the mountaineers. Men who have held their mountain fastnesses and maintained their independence for six centuries within the Turkish Empire look with distrust and contempt on the Toshks whose valleys have been flooded by every wave of invaders. The Toshks, who are the educated men of Albania, and the travelers, are equally contemptuous of the Ghegs, ignorant men unable to read or write. Nor do the Toshks admit that they cannot fight as well as the Ghegs. It was the Toshks in Sicily who fought with Garibaldi, the Toshks of Egypt who fought with Mehmet Ali; the Albanian soldiers in Russia and Rumania and Turkey are Toshk; the 50,000 Albanians in the United States are Toshk, and fought well with the Americans in France. Hundreds of them have returned to spread American ideas through the south; there are Toshk villages in which American English is spoken by nearly every child. Men from these villagers led the forces that drove the Italians from Valona in 1920. Indeed, say the Toshks, they can fight as well as Ghegs. But it is not fighting that Albania needs.
One of the errors about Albania, to which I fear my descriptions may contribute is the belief that the country is entirely mountainous. This is true of the northern part, adjoining Montenegro. Farther south the ranges are like the partitions in a house; steep, high, almost impassable, they surround valleys and plateaus of rich level land, much of it irrigated. The climate of the valleys is semitropical; rice, cotton, tobacco, citrus fruits, figs, and pomegranates flourish. The southern plains, before the war, exported fine horses in considerable numbers. Properly developed, Albania would be a rich agricultural country, even without the fertile valleys of Kossova and Epirus.
The mineral resources of Albania are unknown. During the Austrian occupation, a survey was made, looking toward the development of copper mines during the war; the results of the survey have vanished into the archives of the Austrian War Department. However, even the untrained eye perceives that there are copper and lead in the mountains. English mining engineers have told me that there are probably also silver and gold. I have seen veins of coal projecting on mountain sides; the mountaineers chip it off with hatchets or pry it loose with levers, and use it as fuel to a small extent. There are millions of feet of pine, oak, birch, and beech timber; unlimited water power. There are oil fields near Valona; producing oil wells were sunk, and later destroyed, by the Italians. Valona’s military importance is not the only reason that Albanians are not left in peace.
There is also the political background. For twenty centuries the Albanians have been a beleaguered remnant of the first Aryan race in Europe. By character, temperament, and choice they belong with the peoples of the west, not with their Slav neighbors in the Balkans. But they have had no friends, either in west or east; their whole history has been a struggle for existence.
A TOSHK
In his native costume of southern Albania.