In Albania every moment you touch the rough surface of life. Where there is wealth, it is gross and unembarrassed. Death is close and unhidden. Power and evil are undisguised, with no silk wrappings. Poverty rules to a degree seen nowhere else in Europe, and yet it is not hard to encounter kindness and welcome of a quality not easily found in richer countries.
The great majority of people are living in austere circumstances while in the countryside life has changed little since the medieval period. Many roads are unpaved, while those that are surfaced are so full of holes that even a short drive on what appears to be a straight road is a longer ride because of the curves the driver must make in choosing the path least likely to damage the car. Many still use horse and wagon or donkey. Electricity is unpredictable and the voltage flow so uneven that electrical circuits are easily damaged. Hospitals are few, with meager resources and in appalling condition — broken windows and doors, badly overcrowded, many elevators no longer working. Schools are often in a similar state. Many factories are closed because of age and decay.
Poverty often breeds crime, especially in a society in which religious life has been badly damaged, and this is the case in Albania. The “Albanian Mafia” is infamous throughout western Europe. A car stolen in Amsterdam may well end up in Tirana. There is also the drug trade and, still worse, a trade in young women forced into prostitution with the threat that any effort to escape will result in the murder of one or more members of the woman’s family.
Possibly as much as a third of the Albanian population of three million has left to work in other countries — there is an estimated half-million in Greece alone, many of them there illegally.
Far worse than poverty has been the creation of what Archbishop Anastasios, head of the Orthodox Church of Albania, often calls “a culture of fear” which he sees symbolized by the hundreds of thousands of mushroom-like bunkers scattered throughout the country. Especially during the communist era, neighbor did not dare to trust neighbor. “Unless you like to fight dragons, like Saint George,” one old man told me, “you had to carefully hide even the smallest sign of political dissent or religious belief.”
While repression was normal throughout the Communist world, in no other country was the determination to destroy every vestige of religious life so methodical and thorough as in Albania. At least 355 priests were either executed or perished from illness, starvation or injuries in prisons and labor camps. Religious repression began when the partisans took power after the German occupation. In 1967 Albania went a step further, declaring itself the world’s first atheist state. Every church and mosque was closed. Many religious buildings were demolished. Others were turned in warehouses, weapons depots, stables, stores, clubs and restaurants. (There is still resistance in the government to the return of former churches and monasteries. No matter what road the visitor follows, ruined churches are still easily found, yet also clear indications that for local people even the ruins of a church provide a place of prayer. Candles are lit, small paper icons are left.)
For all its poverty and the harsh history, only among Palestinians have I experienced such absolute hospitality. What little people have they share with an enthusiasm that reveals a different sort of poverty in the rich world.
Among the treasures of Albania today is its Orthodox Church, at the heart of which is Archbishop Anastasios. Now 71, he had hoped to spend this part of his life teaching and writing books but has instead accepted responsibility for leading the Church in Albania.
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