Well the frequency of posting certainly has died down. As of the time of writing this we have 24 days, 3 hours, 25 minutes and 12 seconds until departure!! Not long at all. Woohoo.
I am currently back home in Balclutha, having a bit of a break and seeing the family again. Meanwhile mum has been to the library down here and found two books about Albania. I’m working my way through the first of these, entitled The Accursed Mountains, by Robert Carver.
It’s pretty interesting, so I’ve included a few passages below. The first is (sort of) about Enver Hoxha, the Communist leader of Albania from the end of WWII until 1985.
Pp 96 - 97
Hoxha’s cult of the personality exceeded any in the Communist world, save perhaps that of Kim Il Sung of North Korea, who had a gold statue made of himself which people had to bow down to in the central square of the capital. The one thing Hoxha never did, though, was have his face put on the banknotes. This was for fear of defacement by his enemies, or worse, for the use of his image for cursing him or any other occult sabotage.
Hoxha was superstitious and, like many Albanians, gave great credence to the power of dreams. He never travelled if he had had a bad dream, for fear of an accident. For this purpose, and to deflect assassins, he employed a sosi, or double. Originally a dentist from the Ghen north, this man had been discovered by the Sigurimi and brought to Tirana, where he was given plastic surgery and taught to walk and talk exactly like Hoxha. The surgeons and his trainers were then put in a bus and pushed over a cliff into the Adriatic, to secure the secret. This double often used to impersonate Hoxha in public, opening stadia, visiting factories, making speeches, being filmed as the Great Leader. He was kept in a villa in the Block in Tirana when not needed; he had no clothes of his own, nor indeed any identity save that as Hoxha’s double. He had to read what Hoxha read and develop similar tastes in French literature and Marxist dialectics so he could perform convincingly. Even his food was measured to keep him the same weight as the great Comrade.
Only the memory of his wife and two little daughters keep this exalted prisoner sane. He was even taught how to perform if ever shot by an assassin, to look optimistic and hopeful for the cameras, just in case he survived; as of course he necessarily would, for Hoxha would not have been the one actually stopping the bullet.
When Hoxha finally died, this sosi was given some clothes by his guards and told to disappear. His wife and daughters, of course, had been shot by the Sigurimi in the first week of his training. They now told him apologetically. Devastated, he escaped from Tirana, but was of course a marked man, Everywhere he went people fled at the sight of him: the spirit of the monster come back to haunt them. He was attacked and beaten, shouted at and insulted, spat on and screamed at. Even small children fled from him in tears.
Finally, in deep anguish and despair, he found refuge in one of the gulag camps of the exiles of the south, where they had never seen films or TV, and so did not know what Hoxha looked like. Here Hoxha’s double lived on in obscurity until the fall of Communism in 1991. Then, like everyone else, he tried to escape to the West. He returned to Tirana and climbed over the wall into the West German Embassy. The other refugees screamed and attacked this ghost of the dictator who had followed them even here.
In deep depression the double attacked his own face with a knife, putting out one of his eyes and disfiguring himself appallingly, so he would no longer resemble Hoxha. He gave up all attempts to escape to the West and went back to the gulag camp, where he died shortly afterwards.
And this one is cool, I want to drive this road!! Unfortunately it’s between Korca and Gjirokastra which is probably not in our travel plans – a day trip perhaps?? :) (although the book was published in 1998, so things may have changed?).
Pp 79-80
‘The Communists never repaired the roads’, Dhori told me. ‘They didn’t want people to travel around. They themselves had planes and helicopters to move about it, or strong Benzes which could cope with the roads, This one is as the Italians left it. When there is a landslide, the villagers just fill it in with loose earth, and it soon goes again. In winter it’s often closed for weeks, or impassable with snow. A truck slipped of last week in heavy rain – everyone on board killed – one whole family riding on the top of the sacks. It just rolled over and over…’
We passed wreck after wreck below us, trucks, buses, cars that had slid off the road and tumbled down thousands of feet. I had never been on such a ghastly road before. I could not bring myself to look over the edge of cliffs we crept round so cautiously. I gripped the metal bar in front of me in futile terror much of the time and compulsively sucked boiled sweets from Syria…..
…All the books warn about this one road, but the reality was far, far worse than I imagined. I really did not give us more than a 50% chance of arriving in Gjirokastra. Every 10 minutes or so we would oh-so-nearly slide off the edge, the wheels grasping desperately with such thin purchase on the crumbling soil. I lit cigarette after cigarette and tried to keep looking up, up at the spectacular crags above us.
I have also learned a new word:
Skata
If it means what I’m pretty sure it means then I’m sure I wont ever be using it, but always handy to know these things :)
Perhaps these passages have a slightly negative sound about them, so here’s one to balance things :)
Pp 91 -92
The arrangement was that I would pay $10 a day, without food; but Angelika was and old-fashioned Albanian lady, and having a man in the house was an excuse for her to cook, and cook and cook… All those frustrated family meals she had never been able to prepare she now made for me. Fried eggs, fried cheese, burek, chips, fried goat’s meat with yoghurt, giblets with macaroni, great mounds of food were all prepared while I sat with coffee, raki and cigarettes, waited on hand and foot. ‘You could be pressed to death slowly by loukimia and female attention’, I wrote in my journal; ‘they would wash your feet and dry them with their hair if you let them.’ The strongest contrast with the West was this devotion, this completely uncomplaining and delighted attention the Albanian women paid their men inside the home. Coming from the abrasively post-feminist world of London, these attentions were both touching and embarrassing.
Right, well the roast mum is cooking is smelling pretty darned good about now, so I should go and have some :) Hope everyone else is going well – all the best for the exams ShaRon and Tony.
