Western Minor Literatures

Abstract

Albania (the Illyria of ancient history), wild, mountainous and beautiful — and the last country in Europe to come entirely under the domination of a central government (this is claimed to have occurred under the communist regime over the past twenty-five years) — did not come into existence until 1912. The only periods of freedom it had previously known were intermittent, under rule by chieftains in the fourteenth century, and under the Turks until they finally established it as a province in 1748. But they had subdued it by 1468, after a long struggle in which the Albanians were led by the man who remains the most famous of his race, George Castrioti — Iskander Bey, known as Scanderbeg. He is supposed to have died before the Turks achieved full domination. It was the Turks who imposed the Moslem religion on the originally Roman Catholic Albanians. Today, for what the figures are worth under a communist authority that issues no information to the West or to its communist neighbours, the population is about two-thirds Moslem; the rest are Roman Catholic (perhaps a tenth) or Greek Orthodox. The population is by now probably two million or possibly much more.