Whether Geraldine Marget Virginia Olga Maria Apponyi de Nagy-Appony knew what she was getting into when she agreed to the quickly offered marriage proposal of the eccentric King Zog I of Albania could be discussed ad infinitum. When they married she did not speak Albanian, nor did she know much about the country… or her …
Enver Hoxha died on 11 April 1985. It was the end of more than an era. Hoxha had ruled Albania with an iron fist since 1944. More Stalinist than Stalin, Albania’s allies had all fallen away at various times in his rule; since the Sino-Albanian Split in 1978 Hoxha’s nation had been completely alone. …
When Enver Hoxha proclaimed The People’s Republic of Albania on 11 January 1946, no one was quite sure how the man had gotten himself into such a position. Hoxha was a communist, and he had fought as a Partisan during World War II. By March 1943, the former French teacher had been formally elected First …
In 1907 Kristaq Dishnica died in the United States state of Massachusetts and was buried. His body was placed in the ground, but he was not allowed a religious funeral or a blessing of the gravesite, and the consequences of this act would set in motion events that would entirely change the future of Albania …
In 1917 a man died, and a few years later the marching army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia destroyed his grave. The West knew this man, but they knew him as a woman and only by applying a Western structure to the well known and codified Albanian practice of being a Burnesha, related in a …