Himara, Albania (© Robin Dessens/Shutterstock)
In southern Albania, the Greek minority coexists peacefully with the Albanian population, despite periodic tensions fuelled by the respective governments and nationalist forces. With the tourist boom, the real problem in the region is ruthless capitalism
(This reportage was originally published by the Czech outletDenik Referendum in the framework of PULSE)
I meet 60-year-old Alex on the terrace of a hostel run by a kindly elderly couple on a hill outside the town of Himara in southern Albania. From here we have a breathtaking view. The green rounded hills are followed by wrinkles of grey rocky cliffs. The sandy beach is licked by a clear, azure sea like something out of a travel agent’s catalogue. It’s eight in the morning on a sunny Saturday in Himara, unusually warm for the end of January.
Alex is wearing a black baseball cap and a sweatshirt, a massive gold chain falling from his neck. “Let me tell you something. This is a Greek town, an old Greek town. All the place names are Greek,” he wheezes in a barely audible voice, his eyes fixed insistently on mine. All the while, with a trembling hand, he smokes one cigarette after another.
“My daughter married a rich man, a very rich man. A billionaire. And he tells me I’m Albanian.” He closes his eyes gloomily, as if sadness is weighing them down. “I'm three-quarters Greek,” he states firmly. “Fifteen percent Jewish, and I have some Bulgarian and Romanian roots.”
The brother of the hostel operator comes onto the terrace and greets us cheerfully: “Kalimera!” Alex replies, then turns back to me and, with a slightly triumphant tone, declares: “Do you hear? ‘Kalimera!’ We greet each other in Greek.”
The door of the house opens, and from behind it appears the hostel operator, who smiles and introduces herself with the simple word ‘Jaja’ – Greek for ‘grandmother’. She turns to me: “Jaja, Turkish coffee for you?”
“They don’t drink much coffee in Turkey,” Alex smiles at her. “They mainly drink tea. So why are you offering her Turkish coffee? Offer her Greek coffee, instead!”
Greeks are the largest ethnic minority in Albania. According to the last published results of the 2011 census, twenty-five thousand of them live in the country.
“According to Greece, on the other hand,” notes Kriton Kuci, a researcher and expert on Balkan nationalism at the Albanian Mediterranean University, “there are many more than that. It’s nothing but the politics of numbers. Albania wants there to be fewer Greeks here rather than more, and Greece wants there to be more Greeks here rather than fewer.”
Greece considers anyone with at least one Greek grandparent to be an ethnic Greek. Albania, on the other hand, has long threatened to fine anyone who during the census listed an ethnicity other than the one on their birth certificate. This is despite the fact that, until 1990, the country's Stalinist dictatorship allowed ethnic Greeks to exist only in clearly defined “minority zones” around the cities of Gjirokastër and Sarandë.
Waves of tensions
I accept an invitation to Alex’s for afternoon coffee. He opens the door of his villa without saying a word, gestures for me to take off my shoes and motions to the grey plastic chair in front of the fireplace.
“What do you want to drink?” he whispers.
“Coffee?” I reply quietly, assuming someone is sleeping in the next room.
“Alcohol?” he enquires more briskly.
“Beer?” I whisper.
“And wouldn’t you prefer something that’s like vodka?” he replies, as if he thinks that after a week in Albania I have no idea what raki is.
He brings over a shot of the clear liquid along with a plate of olives and herb cheese. “I’m whispering” he explains, “because illness robbed me of my voice.” His head is bobbing from top to bottom like a child's bobble-head toy.
“So how did you live in Himara, as a Greek, under communism?” I ask.
His eyes get all gloomy and wrinkled again, and with the back of his hand he imitates a slitting of his throat. “We weren’t even allowed to speak Greek,” he finally replies. “I couldn't give my daughter a Christian Orthodox name. I had to give her a Turkish name.” Only after the fall of the regime was he able to rename her ‘Christina’.
Although after the fall of the Stalinist regime Greeks in Albania gained the right to speak their language in public and celebrate their traditions, Greek–Albanian relations in the 1990s were stamped by mutual hostility and suspicion.
To represent the interests of the Greek minority in the country, OMONOIA was founded in 1991 and won five seats in Parliament in the first free elections. A year later, however, its participation in any further elections was banned, since Albanian law prohibits political parties being formed along ethnic, regional or religious lines.
Two years later, Albania arrested six members of the organisation for demanding annexation to Greece and for possessing illegal weapons. Greece then froze all EU aid going to Albania and expelled over 100,000 Albanians who were in Greece without legal visas. Bowing to international pressure, Albania eventually released the OMONOIA prisoners.
After two decades of relative calm, a loud diplomatic and media uproar was sparked in 2023 by the arrest of a candidate for mayor of Himar, ethnic Greek Fredi Beleri, who had accepted an offer of votes for money by a police agent. This happened two days before the election, which the jailed Beleri then won. In violation of Albanian law, he was kept in prison to prevent him from officially taking the oath of office.
Greece has described the conviction of Beleri as a political act and an expression of the ongoing violation of the rights of the Greek minority. In November of the same year, it refused to support a letter calling on the European Commission to open the first chapter of accession negotiations with Albania. Then, last June, Beleri successfully stood as a candidate for the European Parliament on behalf of the Greek right-wing party New Democracy. His conditional release last September is likely to have helped the opening of the first chapter of the accession talks between Albania and the EU in October.
However, the Greek far right continues to refer to the south of Albania, where the Greek minority has traditionally resided, as the northern Epirus, which belongs to Greece. From the media headlines, it is easy to get the impression that Albania continues to be plagued by anxiety over the ‘Greekisation’ of the south of the country, while Greece laments the oppression of the Greek minority in Albania.
A slow process of recognition
After the afternoon meeting with Alex, in town I meet Egda, a member of the aforementioned OMONOIA organisation. “We are happy to be part of Albania,” she says. “However, we believe that as a community we could reach our full potential if we were given respect – and the right to self-determination,” she emphasises.
The sun has gone down. Outside the window, behind Egda, the beautiful cobalt blue darkness of the early evening stretches out. As we talk, Egda toys with a folding tape measure; she works as an architect during the winter, runs a guesthouse during the summer, and later this year she plans to open the café we are sipping our coffee in.
Egda was born in Himara in the 1980s. Soon after the fall of the dictatorship, her family left for Greece in search of a better life, like many others. Thirteen years ago, however, Egda was the only one who decided to “return to her roots” – her family home in Himara, which her grandfather bought in 1930.
“I am so grateful that I went to a Greek school, where I learned Latin, Ancient Greek, and French – where I received a classical European education.” Her curly-haired daughter, who runs around outside and occasionally argues with Egda about whether it really is chilly enough to put on a jacket, is therefore attending a private Greek primary school in Himara. If they want to stay in town, however, at 15 she will have no choice but to start Albanian high school.
“The problem is that the Albanian school curriculum hasn’t changed much since communism,” Egda says, explaining her dislike of the Albanian education system. “The textbooks are full of claims about how proud we are to be Albanian. Like during the previous regime: we are poor, but proud of our nationality and our soldiers on the bases.”
If the state recognised Himara as an area with a large ethnic minority, Egda’s daughter would be entitled to a public education in Greek. However, it was only in 2017 that the right to self-determination was granted to Albanian citizens under the law on national minorities, partly in response to pressure from the EU and Greece. The government then proceeded to implement it only this year, when it passed another law setting out the rules for claiming a minority identity. By 2027, the rights of national minorities should be in line with EU legislation.
Being Greek and Albanian at the same time
Meanwhile, the question of whether ethnic Greeks live in Himara remains the subject of a fiery verbal tug-of-war.
“Himara is Albanian, not Greek,” Adriano, the owner of the hostel where I am staying on my return to Tirana, warns me cautiously.
He wags a raised index finger in resolute disapproval as he slowly adds up the arguments he has learned, never ceasing to smile like the most good-natured uncle. “Do the locals speak Greek? I speak Italian too, and I’m not Italian! They have Greek names? They spent part of their lives in Greece, where they got renamed. They’re Orthodox? So are some Albanians.”
“Historians disagree on whether Greeks have lived in Himara for centuries and whether it is therefore part of their historical settlement – or whether they are Albanians who moved to Greece for economic reasons after the fall of communism, after which they returned,” explains Alba Cela, researcher and head of the European programme at the Albanian Institute of International Studies.
“Self-determination is a human right,” says researcher Kuci. “The state has no business determining my identity. If people in Himara consider themselves Greek, that is their right.” From a mixed family in the Gjirokastër area, he speaks Greek with his mother and Albanian with his father. He considers himself neither Albanian nor Greek – it is his political beliefs and class affiliation that he sees as his defining identity.
“You won’t find many like me in Albania, however; here, nationalism is part of what we call ‘common sense’, or ‘peasant earthiness’. Moreover, Albania’s national identity has always been defined precisely in opposition to Greeks and Serbs.”
A few days ago, Archbishop Anastasios, who moved from Athens to Tirana in the 1990s to revive the orthodox church in Albania, which had been impoverished after the Stalinist dictatorship, died. Some in society nonetheless dispute whether he was a Greek.
“One could write a thesis on the reactions to his death,” says Emilio Çika, an international relations expert from the Albanian Mediterranean University. “So many insults have been hurled at him in these past days!”
Çika, himself an ethnic Greek, comes from a village near Sarandë. “In the south,” he explains, “we have lived together with Albanians for centuries without any problems. But in the north of Albania, some people don’t seem to understand that you can be Greek and Albanian at the same time. If you consider yourself Greek, the argument goes, why do you live here and not in Greece?”.
Land whose price touches the sky
In Himara in January, one business out of ten is due to open on a Saturday night. It’s not just the tourists who are absent, but the locals too, many of whom are spending the winter with relatives in Greece. Not having much choice, I find evening refuge in a dimly lit western biker bar. Dreamcatchers and cowboy hats hang from the ceiling, massive tables are guarded by skulls hewn from wood, and two motorcycles are parked in the middle of the room. A rock ballad alternates with hard rock.
A bearded bartender with a scarf tightened on his head, pirate-style, proudly points to one of the bikes. “That’s a Czech JAVA, from a friend.” When I ask him a question, he looks away at first and pauses, as if he finds it difficult to answer such a banal inquiry. “If we are Greek,” he points out, “it doesn’t matter that much.”
On one of the TV screens, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama is addressing the nation. The bartender listens, then turns back to me. “He’s saying that we’re doing well, that we have a lot of tourists. But how much do the tourists help us? Potatoes, tomatoes, petrol – everything is getting more expensive every year. I have to give you a receipt for one stupid beer. I can’t even build my own house on my land." He pauses, then says: “While five-star hotels are going up next door? While so-called ‘strategic investors’ don't pay taxes?”
On the verdant hills of the Albanian Riviera, the most beautiful coastline in the country, more and more future resorts of grey concrete are springing up. Property prices here are, in Çika’s words, “touching the sky”. This is in a country where, because of the former regime that denied ownership, most locals lack title to their properties. Due to a dysfunctional property registration system, the Albanian state still views many owners of property that had been confiscated under communism as mere users.
“This means that I cannot build anything on my land, transfer it or sell it,” Egda explains. She does not even have title to the house she lives in. “It's like I’m a squatter,” she grins. At the same time, she fears that one day a foreigner from the north of Albania who has managed to fraudulently obtain the title to her land will show up at her door.
Some are trying to steal land from the people of Himara through forged documents dating back to the Ottoman Empire. But above all, so-called ‘strategic investors’ – that is, government cronies whose business Prime Minister Rama portrays as being in the public interest and who are given all sorts of tax breaks – have a free hand when it comes to land without an owner.
“They are doing similar things all over the country, even in the centre of Tirana! It's not that there is a minority in Himara, but that these are very expensive plots of land on the coast, and their real owners have no way to defend themselves against the corruption of this band of thieves with political capital,” stresses opposition politician and intellectual Endrit Shabani, adding that two former mayors of Himara are currently in prison for corruption.
Under the yoke of clientelistic capitalism
Despite the rise of Albanian nationalism, especially on social media, it is true after all that in the context of the Balkans, whose modern history has been marked by numerous and violent ethnic rifts, Greeks among Albanians – like Albanians among Greeks on the other side of the border – live peacefully. The Greeks and Albanians in Albania are suffering above all under the yoke of ruthless clientelistic capitalism, which in the south is fuelled by the ‘touristification’ of the region, which shapes life in the area to meet the needs of tourists without regard for the wishes and interests of the locals.
There is only one health centre in Himara, with two doctors per shift. “And there is no heating!” Egda says indignantly. “Tourists come here to see how exotic Albania is, but our health care system shouldn’t be exotic, right? We who live here are just perpetually angry. On top of that, we have to put on a show all summer for global tourists who have heard that Albania is cheap, so they expect quality at dirt-cheap prices!” She prefers to go to Greece for her demanding medical care.
It is precisely because of a system that only a handful of political dinosaurs and their associated oligarchs survive on that half the Albanian population has left the country since the 1990s – as have at least two thirds of the ethnic Greeks.
“In some villages in the south, there now live ten, maybe fifteen people, while a third generation of Albanian Greeks are growing up in Greece and no longer feel like Albanian Greeks,” laments Çika. “And they haven’t the slightest reason to return to Albania. Some of the villages in the south don’t even have roads, and they have problems with access to running water. There are fewer and fewer of us left.”
The impression of ongoing tensions between the Albanian and Greek populations is largely fuelled by political bickering between the two countries, which does not reflect the reality of the peaceful daily coexistence of the two communities. “Political parties in both Albania and Greece are artificially feeding this conflict ahead of the elections and working with nationalist narratives in their campaigns,” notes TV reporter Esiona Konomi.
Professor Dimitris Christopoulos, a Greek expert on minorities in Europe, agrees: “Greece is constantly putting pressure on Albania in the name of the Greek minority. And Albania is putting pressure on the Greek minority – especially because not a few of them live on the Albanian Riviera, which is so important for tourism. This is more a question of money and unbridled Albanian capitalism than a classic case of bilateral disputes over minority rights.”
The situation of the Greek minority in Albania, he said, has received more attention than is necessary. “If both countries behaved more rationally and less nationalistically, I think we would have nothing to talk about. On the contrary, the Greek minority in Albania could serve as a bridge between the two countries.”
Erion Gjatolli (OBCT) and Kostas Zaiferopoulos (EfSyn, Greece) contributed to the production of this story.
This article was published in the framework of PULSE, a European initiative coordinated by OBCT that supports cross-border journalistic collaborations.