'Oh, I know all about the Albanians', cried a lady; 'they are those
funny people with pink eyes and white hair.' But the Albanian is not
so quickly explainable; and of all the Balkan peoples he is least
known to the English.
--Edith Durham in The Burden of the Balkans
To people only glancingly familiar with it, Albania is the country
that put the a's into Ruritania. With its all-too-familiar
pretensions to antiquity, a language that appears to have remembered
its p's and q's but not many other letters, and an interwar
ruler--King Zog--who can be considered the last word in eccentric,
self-styled (and in his case self-appointed) Balkan monarchs, it is
perhaps understandable that even educated audiences tend to think of
Albanians in terms of the outlandishly dressed impostors in Mozart's
Cosi fan Tutte.
Having to live down such a reputation has not helped Albania to be
taken seriously during the political crisis that has swept over it
this past year. Most reports have stuck to variations on the
following formula: impoverished people (divided into two main
irreconcilable tribes) become even more impoverished as a result of
ruler's fecklessness, and revert to ancient custom of shooting wildly
at anything that moves until both tribes are pacified by an outside
force as bewildered as everyone else. Throw in a few references to
the country's bizarre communist-era dictator, Enver Hoxha, its half
million concrete bunkers that look like a set from a 1950s science
fiction film, plus (as a particularly exotic touch) a group of
lifelong virgins in the north who dress and behave like men, and you
have the makings of a hilarious 5-minute or 500-word "Letter from
Tirana."
