They were never entirely subjugated by Rome; they were not destroyed or assimilated by the Slavs who have been pushing them southward for sixteen hundred years; they never ceased their resistance to Turkey. Since 169 B.C., when the Romans drove them into the mountains, they have been fighting for a free Albania, and giving the Balkans no peace.
They fight with rifles and with diplomacy. They have had no friends, but they profit by the quarrels of their enemies. Wherever there was a weak place in Asia Minor or Central Europe, there the Albanians have tried to strike a blow for Albania. The opportunity of their hero, Scanderbeg, came in the fifteenth century, when the Sultan of Turkey was killed on the battlefield he had won in Kossova. Scanderbeg, whose childhood and youth had been spent in the Sultan’s court, was left second in command of the Sultan’s victorious forces. He profited by the confusion attending the Sultan’s death to get an order giving him command of the fortress of Kruja, built by his father on a mountain overlooking Tirana. The song says that he killed seven horses in reaching Kruja, leaving his escort far behind in the Mati mountains. When he reached the fortress, he at once proclaimed Albanian freedom, and maintained it for twenty-five years of warfare, during which he built citadels and roads and established laws which still exist. After his death, his people waited four hundred years for another chance to strike. Then the Young Turk movement rose. Albanians seized upon it, precipitated the revolution at Uskub in Kossova, and were the deciding factor in terrifying the Sultan and winning the Constitution which promised to respect the languages and laws of subject peoples in Turkey. When these promises were broken, when Montenegro and Serbia invaded Albania, the chiefs raised the flag of Scanderbeg and wrote their own Constitution of Lushnija. The Six Powers, in an effort to maintain the Balkan equilibrium, gave Albania a German king. As soon as the Powers were engaged in the Great War, Albania drove him out. During the war she impartially fought both sides whenever they invaded Albanian territory. When the war ended, when Jugo-Slavia replaced Austria as Italy’s rival on the Adriatic, and England and France quarreled, Albania played a shrewd game at Versailles and Geneva and became officially an independent republic.
Still blockaded after ten years of war and blockade, still fighting invaders in the Mati and the Dibra, she became an independent republic. Her people, from Hoti and Gruda to Corfu, from the Merdite to the Adriatic, were refugees. Her flocks had been killed, her villages burned, her orchards hacked down, her irrigation systems destroyed. She had a provisional government, hardly strong enough to hold itself together. She could not have a permanent government until her boundaries were fixed by the League of Nations.
She had great natural wealth and no debts, but she had no currency of her own, no banks, no credit system. She had hides, wool, and olive oil to export, but all her frontiers were closed by enemies. She had minerals, forests, water power, oil, harbors, but no machines of any kind, no trained men, no commercial organization. She had the strongest men, the bravest fighters, the most indomitable national spirit in Europe, but few of her people could read or write. Certainly more than half the population was ill from malnutrition and malaria, and she had probably the highest infantile mortality rate in Europe.
This was the new Albania which must somehow maintain itself. And if the curtain of silence behind which this Balkan drama is played were a stone wall shutting out her neighbors, the situation would not be so difficult. But Italy—promised southern Albania by the secret Treaty of London in 1915 which induced her to join the Allies against Germany, and cheated of her payment—has authority from the League of Nations to occupy Albania again if the Albanians fail to maintain a stable government. Serbia is still intriguing to push farther south and west the boundary lines not yet entirely fixed by the League of Nations.
There were other difficulties. Because the Toshks are the Albanians who can read and write, the weak provisional government was Toshk. Around the fires in their mountain houses, the Ghegs were saying that only cowardly Toshks would allow free Albania to bow to a League of Nations—a League of the very Powers who were her enemies. The Ghegs, they said, were no such shameful trucklers. And every fire had its refugee guests who had fled from burning villages, leaving terror and death behind them. These refugees cried to their brother Ghegs for vengeance. Did the Ghegs call themselves men and Albanians? they demanded. “Our teeth in the throats of the Serbs!” the Ghegs replied.
Meanwhile in Tirana the Toshks were talking softly of patience, and of more patience, of waiting month after month for a commission and yet another commission from the League of Nations. The Toshks—with that threat of Italian invasion over them—were demanding peace, peace at any cost. Albania must wait for the League of Nations to fix the boundaries, must acquiesce in any boundaries fixed, must be quiet, must wait.
While they waited, the people starved. Prices in Albania are higher than in the United States—higher in dollars. The homespun garments have worn out; there is nothing to replace them. Fields have been devastated, and no men left alive to till them. Flocks have disappeared, horses and mules are gone. And as the boundaries have been fixed, mile by mile upon a map, Dibra and Mati have lost their market cities, Dukaghini and Merdite have lost their grazing lands, the tribes of Hoti and Gruda and Castrati have been cut in two. Still, the Albanian government spoke of peace, demanded peace, and—determined to have peace—set about disarming the Ghegs in the very face of their enemies.
This was the Albania into whose capital I blithely rode, in the rattling little Ford, on that spring night of 1922. I pass over all the minor political disputes, the ambitions of selfish men, the mistakes of foolish ones, the bitter rivalry between Elbassan, to the south, Scutari, to the north, and Tirana, in the center, for the honor and profit of being Albania’s capital. Tirana was, tentatively, the capital; made so because it was everywhere conceded to be the least progressive, the most hopelessly Mohammedan, the most dangerously un-Albanian city in the country. The government had made Tirana the capital for the same reason that the teacher puts the worst boy of the class in the front seat. But this was no solace to Scutari or Elbassan.
Tirana, the white, low town, drowsed in the sun; water rippled in the gutters of the winding, walled streets; donkeys laden with cedar boughs, the brooms of Tirana, carefully picked their footing on the uneven cobbles; women with gayly painted cradles on their backs trudged behind the donkeys. Men in rags of their homespun white garments and Scanderbeg jackets and colored sashes sat all day on the low walls around the mosques. The fez makers, amid their piles of raw wool and mixing bowls and heating irons, were talking politics, and so were the men in the street of the coppersmiths, which is musical from day to sunset with the sound of little hammers beating glowing sheets of metal. At noon the hodjis droned their long prayers to Allah from the minarets. At sunset their voices wailed again, above the sound of clattering hoofs and tinkling bells as the flocks came home to the courtyards. Then the sunset left a yellow sky behind the dark blue mountains. The air was so still that the bells of a mule train, winding down to Tirana on the far-off foothill trails, chimed with the sound of running water in the gutters beside the courtyards’ mud-brick walls. And the Cabinet Ministers of Albania came out to walk.