How quickly the world changes: reading Albanian Journey by Bernard Newman

This was one of the thousands of books belonging to my late father. It is very short at 80 pages so I raced through it after going to bed early last night after it almost leapt out at me from a bedrtoom shelf.  There is no date on this, rather obscure, volume but I guessed almost correctly. 1938.

Newman is no great writer and is terribly British in his approach. He is delighted that the King had brought in British officers to transform a Police force corrupted by a Turkish culture based on bribery. And his language is that you might expect from the upper or middle class characters, not the fake cockneys, in British black and white movies of the 1930s and war years.

He describes a world, just 84 years ago which is utterly alien to us. The Albania of King Zog, was a young country and one where there were few roads. Its biggest town, “the Manchester of Albania” was home to just 23,000 souls. Folks in the valleys of the North saw planes overhead but had never seen a car or motorised vehicle in their lives.

The law of Lek, a strange legal system still held sway in much of Albania and almost all of the North. These were the detailed laws about who you should kill in a blood feud. I kill you, your brother must kill me, my son must kill him, etc, etc. In 1938 Albania, despite the efforts of the laudable Zog, in the North feuding still saw many folks killed every week.

Zog himself was almost killed because of a law of Lek dispute, that is to say a father claimed that Zog had not married his daughter as had been agreed when both children were babies, and so he was entitled to kill Zog.  In 1938 Albania folks really did get engaged just after birth.

Newman travelled across Albania and also into Kosovo where his writings might have served as a warning as to how one day this would become a tinderbox. His book describes how folks, in the North, lived on a diet of sour bread and sour milk excerpt of feast days when they ate meat, of how whole enlarged families of 20 or 40 folks would sleep on twigs with flea infested rugs in one large room in their houses, fortified to allow for blood feuding. And how men wore skirts. Not kilts, Skirts. 

Then there is the Albanian mountain telephone system which does not involve actual phones but a peculiar form of shouting and wailing. But it worked. Unlike the real telephone systems that my father struggled with in Balkan travels of just forty years ago.  

It is just another world and a world that changed dramatically a year after publication when the Italians invaded. That was the start of the destruction of old Albania, It is quite amazing how life can change so dramatically in such a short time.