Page 24 - AACL 25th anniversary

Anniversary Celebration of
Albanian American Civic League
Greci and the Albanian rescue of the italian Peninsula
“Iskender Bey,” or better known as “Skenderbeg,” in memory of Alexander the Great.
By Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi
In 1443, Skenderbeg received word that his father had died in his native home of Kruja, Albania. Because Gjon was well known as the leader of the Albanian opposition to the Ottomans, Skenderbeg sensed the danger to him and to the Albanian people. He seized the moment when he was sent on a military excursion to defeat the Hungarians led by another great freedom fighter (and thorn in the side of the Sultan), Janos Hunyadi. With his military prowess, Skenderbeg distracted the attention of his fellow Ottoman commanders
The history of Greci is inextricably linked to the decisive role that Albania’s leading historical figure, Gjergj Castrioti (aka Skenderbeg), played in saving
the Italian Peninsula and the rest of Western Europe from domination by the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the fifteenth century. This is why Gjergj Castrioti was a towering figure of the fifteenth century not only for Albanians, but for all Europeans, and why his legacy is eternal.
A military genius, a philosopher, a master of several languages, a diplomat, and a devout Catholic, Castrioti has been the subject of numerous books in many languages, poems by Longfellow and Lord Byron, and an opera by Vivaldi. Statues of his iconic figure, sword in hand and atop his majestic stallion, have been dedicated to him in Rome, Vienna, and Budapest. The back story begins in Albania and ends in Greci.
Castrioti was the son of an Albanian prince, Gjon Castrioti, who kept the invading Ottoman Turks at bay for more than twenty years, until he and other Albanian leaders were forced into a deceptive peace treaty in 1422 with Sultan Murad II to secure the rear of the Turkish army in Southeast Europe and spare the lives of his people from the wrath of the Ottoman Empire. To guarantee the arrangement, the Sultan took Gjon’s four sons as hostages and sent them to the Ottoman military academy in its capital, Adrianople. The superb academic and military record of his youngest son, Gjergj, caught the attention of the Sultan, who ultimately would give him the rank of general at the age of nineteen and the honorific name of
and fled the battlefield for Albania with three hundred of his loyal Albanian horsemen. After triumphantly entering Albania, he stormed the White Castle at Kruja on November 28, 1443, and deposed the Ottoman governor. For the next twenty-five years, Skenderbeg would perform some of the greatest military feats that would safeguard Europe from the incursion of Islam by the Ottoman Empire and lay the groundwork for free and democratic states.
In 1461, the King of Naples, Ferdinand I, the son of the late Alphonse, a close friend of Skenderbeg’s, appealed to him to help thwart an impending French invasion. Skenderbeg led an elite cavalry of 4,000 men and drove out the French in the
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Saluting Albanian Religious Tolerance in an Age of Intolerance