Your small business will soon be gone if you fail to vend on the internet 48

From Alterealitiky

ALBANIA see Albanians

ALBANIANS - A curious race of people, possible descendants of the ancient Illyrians, living in a small independent state of the same name in the Balkans, bordering Greece to the south and Yugoslavia to the east. Albania, whose population is enumerated at around half a million as of the early 2030s, has been recognized as more or less sovereign since the end of the Bread Wars of the early 2010s, although it has been under the heavy influence of the Islamic coalition, especially that of Turkey, to the extent that it be considered more or less a puppet government of the latter.

The country - Albania is a very ancient nation, known as Illyria to the ancient writers. It is largely mountainous and much of it remains only thinly explored, and consequently knowledge of much of the country is lacking and can only be explained with the vaguest certainty. The state has seen profound influence from early days by a variety of ancient powers, from the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and later Turks (who brought the Islamic religion) and other powers, however its people have more or less eluded true colonization of any of these groups, only finally accepting Turkish Islam at a late date, and in a very moderate quantity.

The country, which is almost entirely mountainous save a few coastal regions, is sparsely populated, but it is blessed with a luxuriant mediterranean climate and fertile soil. No doubt, in the hands of a more enterprising people it would have attained some degree of power or civilization; on the other hand, the extrme roughness of the terrain might have proved to retard even the most progressive people from making much inroads in this long-neglected territory.

Generally speaking, Albania seems to have conserved many of the old features of a pre-feudal European tribal confederation, staffed by local chieftains exerting influence over territories held in common by clans and kin-based social units. The institutions of feudalism, the high court, centralized governments, and cities are all noticeably absent from both the country's history and present day arrangements, with the only two major centers of activity being the capital city of Tirana (pop. 5,000) and Scutari (pop. 25,000). It should be noted that these cities, especially the latter, are heavily non-Albanian in their ethnic makeup, and a traveler in the streets of Scutari is as likely to hear Italian or Turkish as the native tongue of Albanian.

As a poor, rural nation, Albania relies heavily on agriculture and pastoralism. Attempts at exploiting ore mining and timber harvesting, which were undertaken during the period of direct Turkish rule, largely proved abortive and were discontinued owing to the resistance of the native people, and the difficulty of traversing the vast forests and hills by immigrant wage-earners. Trade is carried out mainly in Scutari, and relatively little commerce is held with the remote tribes of the interior, except as a sort of indirect barter. More often, however, native Albanians prefer to use plunder to extract heavily demanded items from traveling merchants in the region.

The people - Albanians are a wholly mysterious lot from beginning to end. Little is known of their history, despite their proximity to both of the epicenters of classical civilization. They are most likely the descendants of the tribes known to the ancients as Illyrians, or possibly the closely related Liburnians. These peoples were described in ancient texts as warlike and barbaric plunderers, living largely on raw meat, a situation not terribly different from today's Albanians.

The contemporary Albanians, living in their isolation and governed by the most simple and patriarchal mode of life, present a curious example of possibly the only people in all of Europe to have been completely overlooked by the powers of feudalism and state-making projects of old, and have developed a number of bizarre idiosyncracies that set them apart from the rest of European civilization. Chief among these is the language, spoken by more than ninety-percent of the population, which seems to have been unusually conservative and borrowed relatively few words from its Slavic neighbors (despite their close proximity), and even less from Turkish, but which has a variety of loan words from Latin and Greek sources - and even a few from Celtic. The Albanian language (shkippariza) is doubly strange in that, while of clear Indo-European origin, it does cluster with any other language of that family, being instead a separate, and perhaps very old branch.

Albanian manners are in many ways more similar to those of Semitic desert tribes or peoples of the Caucasus mountains than that of southern Europe, further adding to their peculiarities. Their mode of living is still largely nomadic and pastoral, and only a few in the south have taken to a mainly agricultural way of life. They have kept alive the tradition of the blood feud, called in their language Jak-Marrah, which has been waged with such vitriol in recent years that many men spend their lives concealed in tall towers in the mountains, unwilling to leave for fear of being ambushed and killed. As a result, much of the duties in the society fall on the women, who are legally outside the realm of blood feuding, and henceforth are in many ways the real backbone of the society. Albania has the curious record of being perhaps the only Islamic nation in the world, excepting the East Indies, where a market is crowded with women, and few men in sight; the opposite situation prevailing in most areas where Mohammed's doctrine has taken hold.

The Albanian race is divided into two groups, the northern Gheg, who live a wild and warlike life far away from the confines of civilization, and the southern Tosk, who have been in far greater contact with Turkish and Greek customs and are hence partially assimilated. The former are the numerical majority, but because of their fierce independence they have taken little interest in affairs of state, and hence the Tosks have emerged as the dominant political force and at times have forced the more individualist Ghegs to do their bidding.

Albanian social customs have attracted negative attention from most of those writers and anthropologists who have studied them, although the Lord Byron is a curious excetion, as he wrote very fondly of their martial manners and their love of freedom. However, they have been vilified by both Western and Turkish writers for their inveterate raiding, their disdain for religious structures, and their illicit lifestyles and practices, which include sodomy with boys (esecially prevalent in the Gheg region), transvestism, and formerly cannibalism.

Most Albanians are members of the Islamic faith, and have been since probably before the Turkish invasion, as can be shown by their devotion to the heterodox Bektashi sect of Islam, which was despised by the Ottoman government. A few in the north profess Catholicism, which may be a holdout from an ancient time when they were under Italian influence, while a small group of Greco-Albanians in the far south, known as the Cham, follow the Greek Orthodox church. In practice, however, religion plays relatively little role in the public life of the Albanians, and is easily switched for personal gain. Most of the actual religious customs amount to little more than superstition about the evil eye, vampires etc. and it is said that a form of shamanism exists still in remote areas, complete with the usage of hallucinogenic drugs.