Culture
> The Land & The People
Albania has a reputation as a land of great natural
beauty and romantic remoteness. These two characteristics
have made it all the more attractive, mysterious,
forbidding, challenging, or exasperating to outsiders,
be they travelers, scholars, diplomats, or merchants.
For example, in a work he published in 1913, the
Croatian scholar Milan von Sufflay called Albania
regio mirabilissima, "a most singular
country" or "a most marvelous country"
(1). Others have referred to it as the "Switzerland
of the Balkans" or as the "rock garden
of southeastern Europe." On the other hand,
the country's uncommon isolation from the world,
arising generally from its rugged, mountainous
terrain, has led foreigners to speak of it as
"the Tibet of Europe" or as a country
more mysterious than central Africa. It is an
attitude that has had currency for centuries.
We find it, for instance, in the writings of Edward
Gibbon, the great eighteenth-century British historian.
Speaking of Albania, Gibbon said that it is "a
country within sight of Italy, which is less known
than the interior of America." (2)
The
remoteness and isolation of the country became
practically legendary and all too frequently gave
rise to reports and descriptions of the land and
of the people - even in books and encyclopedias
- that were closer to legends than to reality.
Perhaps because of its romantic remoteness and
other reasons, Albania has exerted a continuous
fascination on artists, including poets, playwrights,
composers, and more recently film makers and producers
of television programs. Shakespeare set his comedy
Twelfth Night in Illyria - the name by
which Albania was known in former times. Lord
Byron, who visited southern Albania in 1810, wrote
some stirring lines about her landscape in his
poem Childe Harold.
Morn
dawns: and with it stern Albania's hills...
Robed half in mist, bedewed with snowy rills.
In
Mozart's comic opera Cosi fan tutte the
principal male characters, Ferrando and Guglielmo,
appear for the most part as two "Albanian
noblemen" in clever scheme to test the love
of their fiances. [The women fail the test
when they succumb the charms of the Albanians
but succeed nevertheless in winning back the love
of their men.]
From: Prifti, Peter R. Socialist Albania since
1944 - Domestic and Foreign Developments.
Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1978.
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