He graduated as a civil engineer in and was one of the first engineers drafted straight into the army. That was starting in when we left the Warsaw Pact.
And that was no small task; the army division Duraj was assigned to had 13, bunkers of various sizes to build.
Constructing the bunkers was such a monumental task that almost every major factory in Albania was put to work. Cement factories churned out prefabricated concrete sections that an army of labourers would assemble in the field. Duraj had to negotiate with the collectives who were in charge of the rural settlements, which were organised much like the collective farms in the USSR.
In a way we could say the whole nation was involved in this process. The military managed it, but the people did the work. Public construction companies would produce them, public transportation companies would transport them to the field and then we had to hire local people according to their skills. Then, the unskilled labour was done by soldiers. The QZ bunkers were designed for one of two soldiers to delay the advancing enemy Credit:Stephen Dowling.
We had to deal with all the communications between them. We dealt also with command points for all the military, tunnels or underground constructions. Ammunition storage was built by us, fuel deposits, food and clothing and chemical storages. Even where the bunkers were to be located meant changes to their design, Duraj says. They had a reinforced plate of iron that would protect it from missiles and bullets.
But to build a firepoint bunker of the mountain type would take 70 different elements. Then we had to connect them with iron and cement. The engineers like Duraj were carrying out a task with no comparison in the modern world. As inspiration, they looked at some of the huge fortifications built in Europe before and during World War Two, such as the Maginot Line, which the French constructed amid the fear of a German invasion in the s.
Building bunkers was more important than growing food. The pollution-spewing steelworks in Elbasan produced steel for bunker production Credit: Getty Images. The work had to be carried out in all weathers, the heaviest parts hauled up by tractors or by World War Two-era Soviet Zil trucks and then assembled by hand. We also had accidents with cranes falling, killing people accidentally. The BunkArt museum in Tirana estimated that the bunker building programme cost lives for every year of construction.
Duraj claims those numbers are too high, but agrees that there were fatal accidents during the construction of the bunkers. Was Albania really under such grave threat that it needed to build this many? We built bunkers in mountaintops, on the rocks. This would have once been a hive of industry, as concrete cupolas were produced around the clock, ready to crown the tops of waiting bunkers.
Today it is just a shell. The factory was torn down long ago, leaving little except rubble and the overhead gantries that would once have hauled heavy concrete slabs across the factory. It is a picture of post-communist decay. Gjirokaster was home to factories which helped produce parts for the bunkers Credit: Getty Images. Near the ruined factory is Adi, who runs a local scrapyard, full of dystopian piles of crushed metal and soot-faced workers burning plastic off wires.
When he bought the property, he also inherited the old factory nearby. It can take 10 of them a whole day to dismantle a bunker. They travel by car — when the construction brigades had to build them, it was often done with little more than the help of mules. The year-old Adi remembers the bunkers from when he was a boy. Now we find the reminders of those days and thank God we had no war. By then the bunkers had been colonised by snakes, though Nico is convinced that one day he will find one full of treasure.
The QZs and PZs, instead, linger like the remains of some long-vanquished army. Albanian pies remain one of the most preferred traditional foods. People love them because they can take the pies on the go for a quick meal or snack. There are many different types of fillings that can go into a byrek. Not only does this dish have different types of fillings, but it can also come in different shapes.
This all depends on the region where you try it. The older generation usually eats byrek after the main course. Others eat it most frequently as a quick snack or as a closing plate. It is still common for Albanians to make byrek at home, although you can also find them in local restaurants and shops that specifically sell these pies. It has a gelatin consistency that melts in your mouth, giving you the chance to taste the nuts or dry fruit that it is made with.
It is a popular Albanian dessert that is traditionally eaten during the first month of the Islamic calendar. However, you can easily find this tasty dessert in any pastry in Albania all year round. It is widely known throughout the Balkan as Elbasan tava. It has been named from the Albanian city from where the dish originated.
Tave Kosi is usually made with lamb meat but some Albanians also use chicken as an option. This dish has a very unique taste. The baked yogurt has a soft texture and tastes a bit sour, while the meat balances it well, giving the dish its juicy meaty flavor. Trilece or also known as milk cake is a light Albanian dessert that originates from Turkish cuisine.
It is a popular dessert that is made out of three different kinds of milk that include evaporated milk, heavy cream, and condensed milk. Depending on the region, this Albanian cake can be light and consisting of air bubbles or concentrated and thick. Trilece has a very unique taste that can be described as lightly crispy and sweet at the top, soft and light in the middle, and juicy on the bottom. However, this dessert is not for everyone.
If you love a soft, moist, and sweet dessert then you can find this cake in any Albanian pastry shop. Kackavall is a traditional Albanian cheese that comes from the cow or sheep. The consistency of Kackavall cheese changes depending on the kind of animal it comes from. Baked cheese with tomatoes acts as a side dish as the melted cheese adds flavor when eaten with different kinds of meat. It is really common to find it in Albanian grill house restaurants. Stuffed bell peppers are a very popular local dish.
They are widely served throughout all regions of Albania and can be found in countryside restaurants that serve traditional food. The dish consists of green bell peppers that are stuffed with rice. The exact recipe changes depending on the way it was passed on. Some Albanians add chopped lamb meat or tomatoes rather than just rice. The stuffed peppers then are baked and served hot. This dish is served with Greek yogurt, feta cheese, or dhalle. In Albania, fried dough is traditionally served in many different ways.
Petulla is commonly eaten as a snack or during dinner. You can find food stands that serve fried dough combined with a topping of your choice throughout Tirana and Durres. Toppings include chocolate, strawberry jam, shredded Kackavall cheese, or ketchup. Fried dough is quick and easy to cook in most Albanian households.
The most common way to eat them is with feta cheese or honey. Another less popular but delicious toping it is eaten with mainly in the northern region is Greek yogurt and garlic. Albanian fried dough is heavier in consistency than doughnuts but has the same crispy outside and soft inside.
Since most of Albania is near the Mediterranean Sea, you can probably guess it will have at least one traditional dish consisting of fish. Of these, 29 were in-depth interviews that took place in northern Greece including 19 in Thessaloniki and focused on issues of adaptation and exclusion.
The chapter also relies upon statistical and cartographic analyses of data from the Greek census regarding the foreign population of Thessaloniki. The geographical dispersion of Albanians in the Greek territory is rather balanced compared to other groups of foreigners Kokkali , pp.
At the geographical scales examined district, commune, postal code entities , I found no large concentrations of Albanian households. Taboada-Leonetti , p. They attribute in this way spatial visibility to the group in question. The Filipinos have their own places of worship and the Palestinians, too; both groups have collectively rented apartments that have been transformed into places of worship.
Albanians, however, did not adopt similar practices. They are surprisingly absent from the ethnic mosaic emerging in the city of Thessaloniki. Unlike other groups, they do not possess of any of the above-mentioned ethnic infrastructure. A study carried out in by Visoviti et al. Those three places are the only ones to offer a regular collective visibility of Albanians in the public space. At the two piazzas, Albanian men of all ages look for jobs, particularly unskilled ones. Yet, the piazzas are not meeting points for friends or compatriots.
The piazza at the west end of the city centre near the train station of Thessaloniki is situated in front of the travel agencies that offer daily bus transport to Albania.
This is a sector with an intense Albanian presence. Although it recently moved, the Albanian consulate in Thessaloniki used to be here as well, thus attracting a number of Albanian translation agencies and the only Albanian bookstore in Thessaloniki recently closed.
Accordingly, a particular Albanian dynamics have gradually developed in the district, involving some very specific functions—finding a job, making use of the translation services, or taking a bus to Albania. In other words, there is no Albanian centrality in Thessaloniki—nothing to remind us that the aforementioned places are highly frequented by Albanians.
This would possibly provide some kind of visibility of the Albanian culture, including language, customs, music, and culinary habits. However, the way in which they take up their position in the city cannot be irrelevant to their migratory strategies and, thus, to the way their adaptation occurs in Greece. These practices include religion shifts and name concealing. In the abundant literature that exists on Albanian migration in Greece, it is not uncommon to find reference to these practices De Rapper a ; Kretsi a ; Psimmenos In summary, in the s to the mids, many Albanians in Greece adopted Greek names, while many Muslim Albanians seemingly disavowed their religious affiliation, claiming to be Orthodox Christians Kretsi a , pp.
Many had themselves and their children christened Orthodox, irrespective of their previous religious affiliation Muslim or Catholic. As an informal practice, the name-changing was not reported in any official documents such as identity cards or passports. One third of the migrants interviewed during our empirical study in — admitted using a Greek name instead of their original name.
Agreeing to a formal ritual demanded—explicitly or implicitly—by the host society seems thus to have represented a necessary action for some parents, who wanted to give their children an opportunity to integrate in Greece and particularly into the Greek state school system. The practice of adult name-changing has similar traits; though in theory a deliberate choice, it has undoubtedly been an implicit or not requirement of the dominant society.
The name-changing and the disavowing of the original religious affiliation are indicative but are not the only elements of a broader process of identity negotiation. As Psimmenos , pp. It is obvious, however, that not all the Albanians react in the same way. These were mainly men living in Greece without a nuclear family.
Mai , p. Erving Goffman , p. Pavlou , p. It is unnecessary to discuss here in detail the harsh campaign of criminalization and stigmatization that Albanian immigrants have been subjected to since , as these are well-documented Karidis ; Pavlou , pp.
The mass emigration of its members to Greece, together with the preferential treatment they received from the Greek state and society at least, on arrival 11 triggered the identity dissimulation and enabled its operation.
Albania, in contrast, adopted the opposite approach, trying to underestimate the minority population Dodos , pp. At least during the s and early s, it became very popular among Albanian immigrants to Greece to claim that they were Vorioepirotes literally, Northern Epirots, i. It could also mean introducing oneself with a Greek name, while claiming to be Christian.
This was not without reason. As mentioned above, the preference of the state and of the society for the kin groups of foreign citizens has been more than obvious.
As such, the Pontic Greeks, followed by the Greek-Albanians, were found at the highest level of this imaginary scale. Given that Orthodox Christianity is the official religion in Greece, 13 it would not be surprising to classify the other Christian Orthodox migrants directly below these two privileged groups, 14 while those who are Muslims would find themselves towards the bottom of the hierarchy Kokkali , p.
Albanians in particular, given their systematic criminalization, were immediately classified at the very bottom of the social hierarchy in Greece. Without any doubt, this is an additional reason for the expansion of the phenomenon of identity dissimulation or negotiation.
As such, finding a place within the extended boundaries of Greekness is a possible way towards inclusion. The gradual expansion of the boundaries of Greekness, operated by both the society and the state in Greece and even in Albania , has had a severe impact on the expansion of practices of identity negotiation of Albanians in Greece. This dichotomy is important for identity negotiation. In the previous section, I have tried to elucidate the conditions under which the practices of identity dissimulation and negotiation were generated and the reasons why they were extended.
This is only part of the explanation: in the next section, I focus on the Albanian side of the interaction, which implies looking at Albanian history and culture. The recent history of Albania has been marked by poverty, while its political and socio-economic situation has been shaped by repetitive crises shaking the country since the fall of the previous regime. Migration became the main livelihood strategy. As foreign migrants, Albanians discovered this new world, literally from the bottom, for they almost automatically entered the lowest socio-economic categories of the host societies.
French ethnographer De Rapper argues that discovering the outside, in the early s, naturally caused a great shock to the Albanian people and the collapse of many identity certainties see also Lubonja , p. The following extract for more, see Kokkali a , pp. In general, Albanians help each other but only among relatives; never strangers….
You cannot understand Albanians: now they like each other and then, after two minutes, there is the brawl…It is like that, by their blood, their race S. We do not care about [Albania], nor can we help. I think that in the future they [the politicians, the State] will rob people even more L.
We are well here, happy. The identity uncertainties that this contrast seems to have generated are persuasively described by Albanian journalist Fatos Lubonja , p. Albanians continue to live divided between the glory of their virtual world and the misery of their real world.
One of the most eloquent expressions of that separation is the paradox in which on the one hand Albanians express their pride in being Albanians, considering themselves to be natural superiors while on the other hand, they regularly defame their country and try to escape from it in search of a better life. I have never hidden the fact that I come from Albania.
The image of Albanians constructed by the rest of the world and mirrored back to them, yet marked by prejudice, has undoubtedly had a decisive influence on the perception of the self within the country and in a migratory context.
Internalizing the stigma has thus been a result of a twofold situation related both to the source and the settlement country. All are factors that seem to have given rise to identity uncertainties for Albanian migrants and non-migrants, and, in turn, to identity negotiations in the country of settlement.
In his study on the management of stigma, Goffman , p. Overall, managing the stigmatized identity one way or another is a strategy of adaptation of the Albanian individual to a double situation: non-acceptance and stigmatization in Greece, as well as uncertainty regarding Albania and the Albanians. In , in Albania, there was official abolition of all religious activities, even in the private sphere. Harsh persecution of religious practices and the closing down or destruction of many places of worship also took place.
However, for several reasons, the regime did not erase the primordial community identities, such as family, regional, or religious. For example, mixed marriages remained rather rare, except among the urban elite Clayer This is probably because, for Albanians, to be Christian or Muslim is very important in the construction of the self.
While the nationalist rhetoric relaunched during the communist regime in a slightly different version insisted that one is Albanian before being Christian or Muslim, it seems that—at least locally—one should be Christian or Muslim in order to be Albanian De Rapper b. This brings into light the complexity of the issue of religiosity in Albania, which comes in stark opposition to a widely diffused view on the religious indifference of Albanians Malcolm , p.
First, according to ethnographer De Rapper a and historian Clayer , for Albanians, the religious affiliation is more a form of social organisation, collective involvement and recognition of a common origin than religious belief alone. The community identification based on religion persists today, even though it is less assertive in religious practice than in the conscience of belonging to a distinct group Clayer ; De Rapper a.
One is Muslim or Christian by following the patrilineal religious affiliation. This means belonging to a cultural community, but also to a quasi-biological one, given that specific kinship groups are involved in this belonging.
In that sense, nominally adopting a faith that is different from the original religious community could not affect the quasi-genealogical relation to this latter. Since the restoration of religious freedom in , the new religious scene that emerged has added more complexity to the issue.
Religion in Albania appears now to be both marginal and central, argues Clayer Religious practice continues to be rather limited, although places of worship have blossomed again all over the country ibid. Still, in some respects, religion is central. As mentioned above, collective identities based on religion have remained strong. Clayer ibid. As a result, religion seems to appear in the behaviour of individuals and, more importantly, in socio-political developments.
Overall, there is a whole constellation of different meanings, perceptions and attitudes towards religion in Albania. Conversions to Christianity are often a means to express an adhesion to the Western world. The Catholic community is often presented as the main force in the historical development of Albanian nationalism, even if this does not really coincide with reality.
He wrote in the early s:. In light of these trends, the conversions and shifts or pseudo-shifts of religion in Greece but also in Italy are better understood.
There is only one Lord. Regardless of religion. Ethno-religious border-crossing and syncretism has been widespread.
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