maybe the English Department at Yale. Hoxha’s successor, Ramiz Alia, stayed the loony course for a while, but in 1990, with communism going into a career slump all over the globe, Alia tried some reforms. Wrong call. The Albanians’ response to a sudden introduction of personal autonomy and individual responsibility casts an interesting light on the human psyche. They ran like hell. According to Balkans expert James Pettifer, “Over 25,000 people seized ships moored in Durres Harbor and forced them to sail to Italy.” Thousands of others fled to Greece or occupied the grounds of Western embassies in Tirana. University students pulled down the gigantic gilded statue of Enver Hoxha in Skenderbeg Square, and the Alia government had to dismantle and hide the nearby statues of Stalin and Lenin. There was repeated food rioting, widespread destruction of public property, and extensive looting of everything owned by the government—and everything was. Then things got better. Dr. Sali Berisha, whom Pettifer calls a “leading cardiologist” (Albania has a leading cardiologist?), was elected president. The Communists were jailed. In Pettifer’s words, “The new government . . . embarked on a program of privatization and the construction of a free-market economy.” But life got too much better. This privatization being programmed and this free-market economy being constructed were based on only one industry: pyramid schemes. Although Albania seems inaccessible, it has been, over the past three millennia, repeatedly accessed. Albanians have had the misfortune to live too close to the kind of folks who can’t seem to resist invading things—even things like Albania. Albania has been invaded by various Greek city states, Macedonia, Rome, Byzantium, Slavic hordes, Byzantium again, Bulgarian hordes, Byzantium one more time, Normans, Christian Crusaders, Charles I of Anjou, Serbs, Venetians, Turks, and Fascists. Durres, historically the principal city of Albania, has changed hands thirty-three times since the year 1000. Albania has been invaded, yes. Conquered, no. While the rest of the Balkan Peninsula was being hellenized, latinized, Slavofied, or Turkey-trotted, Albanians stayed Albanian. Their language is the last extant member of the Phrygo-Thracian family of tongues once spoken by peoples from the far side of the Black Sea to the eastern Adriatic.
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