Albania historical timeline

Origins

The Illyrians held this coast and its mountains from the Bronze Age, and Albanians are generally taken to descend from them. Greek colonists founded Apollonia and Butrint on the shore; Rome absorbed the interior and drove the Via Egnatia across it, the road that carried traffic from the Adriatic to Constantinople. The language is the strongest evidence of continuity: Albanian is its own branch of Indo-European, with no close living relative anywhere.

Turning points

From the castle at Krujë, Skanderbeg held off Ottoman armies for twenty-five years from 1443, and for that he became the national figure. After his death the Ottomans took the country and kept it for nearly five centuries, in which a majority converted to Islam. Independence came in 1912, a monarchy followed, and Italy invaded in 1939. What came after the Second World War was the defining experience: Enver Hoxha ruled for forty years and broke with every ally in turn — Yugoslavia in 1948, the Soviet Union in 1961, China in 1978 — declared the world’s first officially atheist state in 1967, and left the country the most isolated in Europe. The regime fell in 1990 and 1991, and in 1997 the collapse of nationwide pyramid schemes brought the state close to civil war.

Influential people

Skanderbeg, whose helmet is on the flag of nothing but is on the national imagination entirely. Ismail Qemali, who declared independence at Vlorë in 1912. Enver Hoxha, whose forty years are still being argued about. Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian from Skopje, after whom the airport is named. And Ismail Kadare, who wrote novels inside the dictatorship that were read as coded and won the first International Booker Prize in 2005.

Cultural evolution

The Kanun, a body of customary law written down in the fifteenth century, governed the northern highlands in place of any state, and two of its concepts survived it: besa, a word of honour that cannot be withdrawn, and the blood feud, which has not entirely gone. Religion sits unusually lightly — a Muslim majority, Orthodox and Catholic minorities, and the world headquarters of the Bektashi Sufi order in Tirana — and Albanians tend to describe tolerance as the national trait. Iso-polyphonic singing from the south is on the UNESCO list.

Present-day significance

Albania joined NATO in 2009 and is negotiating to join the European Union. The concrete bunkers Hoxha built in their tens of thousands are now bars, museums and storage. Emigration has been heavy enough to reshape the population, while the Riviera and the Ottoman-era towns of Berat and Gjirokastër have made tourism one of the fastest-growing parts of the economy.