Page 25 - AACL 25th anniversary

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famous Battle of Apulia, near Naples. In return for this victory, Ferdinand I awarded Skenderbeg and 2,000 of his soldiers the mountaintop village of Greci. The security of the Kingdom was assured when Castrioti decided to leave his cavalry in Greci, while he returned to Albania to continue to defend the country from Ottoman Turkish domination. (Visitors to Greci will find that the main road is named “Via Skenderbeg,” and that the original homes of Skenderbeg’s troops have been preserved, although they are in need of restoration.)
It was only after Skenderbeg’s death in 1468 that the Ottomans were able to get a foothold in Albanian lands, completely overtaking them in the 1480s. It was then that hundreds of thousands of Albanians fled across the Adriatic Sea to the Kingdom of Naples and beyond in search of freedom from Turkish domination and forced conversion to Islam. In addition to Greci, they would establish fifty more Albanian-speaking villages that would flourish and are thriving today in Campania, Puglia, Sicily, and Calabria. The Albanian refugees, called the Arberesh, preserved Albanian cultural traditions, language, and their Catholic heritage during the
Ottoman reign of Albanian lands that would last for 425 years. (Beginning in the 1960s, the late Albanian linguist Martin Camaj would spend years in Greci, studying and documenting what he deemed to be the best original form of the Albanian language, which was spoken and written there.)
This is why the Arberesh remain attached to Albanian lands, but also why Albanians remain forever attached to Italy. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1912, Albanians found themselves battling Slavic incursion, beginning with the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. With the assent of the so-called “Great Powers” (Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia), Albanians were unfairly and artificially divided. Only because of the intervention of then-US President Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I in 1918 was the State of Albania created. Three and a half million Albanians live in Albania today; another three and a half million live side by side on its borders— in Kosova (an independent nation since 2008), Macedonia, Montenegro, the Presheva Valley (southern Serbia), and Chameria (northern Greece). Another eight million live in the diaspora, primarily in the United States, Western Europe, Turkey, and Australia—having fled Slavic state-sponsored terrorism and later Communism well into the twentieth century.
It is Greci, in particular, to which Albanians around the world are connected. When a child is born in an Albanian village in Italy, the child is lifted up in the direction of Albania. When a child is born in any Albanian land in Southeast Europe, or in the diaspora, he or she will grow up learning about Skenderbeg, and that Greci was the only Albanian-speaking village in modern Italy that Skenderbeg ever stepped foot in. Skenderbeg is the national hero who unites all Albanians in a yet unfinished national story that began in Italy six hundred years ago.
March 18, 2015 Ossining, New York
the publication of this article, which will appear in a forthcoming book, Greci Connections, is sponsored by the family of Zef Balaj, who have a longstanding commitment to the publication of books about Albanian history and culture.
88 Saluting Albanian Religious Tolerance in an Age of Intolerance 25