Read religion, language and chancery practice as nationality, and Albanians disappear from the past by category rather than by fact.
by Maringlen Cara (Tirana) | 8 September 2026
In 1623 Pjetër Mazreku sent Rome a report from Prizren. The city, he wrote, contained twelve thousand Turks. Then he added three words that should have prevented three centuries of confusion: quasi tutti Albanesi. Almost all Albanians.
There is no contradiction in the sentence unless we insist on giving a seventeenth-century word a twentieth-century passport. In Mazreku’s report, Turk plainly did not mean ethnic Turk. He knew the difference because he was looking at the people rather than the category. Twelve thousand Turks in the column. Almost twelve thousand Albanians in the town.
The distinction did not survive nationalism intact.
On 3 February 1919 Eleftherios Venizelos sat before Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando in Paris and asked them for southern Albania. Northern Epirus, he said, contained 120,000 Greeks and 80,000 Albanians. Then he admitted something inconvenient about his Greeks: many of them spoke no Greek. They spoke Albanian.
Venizelos had an answer for that too. Language was not decisive. The Muslims of Albania, he told the conference, had accepted Ottoman rule and become real Turks. The Christians of southern Albania had remained attached to Greece.
There it is, in the minutes of the Peace Conference, from the Greek prime minister. The Muslim Albanian leaves history through one door and the Orthodox Albanian through another. One becomes Turk. The other becomes Greek. Neither is required to change the language spoken at home.
Four years later the principle acquired forms and stamps and, within the year, ships.
The population-exchange convention signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923 did not ask what language a man spoke to his children. Its first article ordered the compulsory exchange of Greek nationals “of the Moslem religion” and Turkish nationals “of the Greek Orthodox religion.” Religion had become an international administrative instrument for moving populations.
Everyone involved knew that this created an Albanian problem. Eleven days before the convention was signed, the Greek delegate Dimitrios Caclamanos assured the conference that Greece did not intend to exchange Muslims of Albanian origin. The Turkish delegate said Ankara wanted Turkish-speakers, not Albanians.
The assurance did not keep every Albanian off the ships. Mixed Commission records cited in the subsequent correspondence put about 1,500 Albanian-speaking Muslims from the Paramithi (Paramythia) district among those deported. By August 1924 Albania was before the League of Nations, in a letter of 11 August circulated as document C.399.1924.VII with six annexes, asking whether Greece was honouring the promise it had made at Lausanne.
The bureaucracy had arrived where the historian already stood. Put religion in the nationality column and the Albanian disappears.
In Kosovo a powerful strand of Serbian scholarship produced two exits instead of one. It explained the Albanians there in either of two ways, and the two circulated side by side. They had arrived after the Serbs left, in the wake of the great migration of 1690, and so held the land as newcomers. Or they were Arnautaši, Serbs who had lost their language and faith and turned Albanian, and so were not really Albanian at all. He came yesterday. Or his grandfather was one of us. Either road ends at the same border.
Islam makes him too Ottoman to belong. Orthodoxy makes him belong to somebody else. The conclusions contradict one another. Their function does not.
Albanians exist everywhere in the modern Balkans and nowhere in its past.
That sentence is the achievement of a century of writing, and it required one more operation to complete. The Christian Albanian in the medieval record had to be removed as well, so his names were made to testify against him.
Gjon Kastrioti held the country between Lezhë and Dibër at the start of the fifteenth century. He had four sons, Stanish, Reposh, Kostandin and Gjergj. In 1426 he and his sons assigned Hilandar, the Serbian house on Athos, rights in two villages, Radostuša and Trebište. Between then and 1431 he and three of the boys bought four adelphates there, rights to reside on monastic property and draw support from it if the Turks took everything. The St George tower attached to those rights is still known as the Albanian Tower, the Arbanaški pirg. Reposh went there and died there in 1431. A Hilandar manuscript also records the death of a monk Joakim Kastriot, whom scholars have identified as Gjon.
The charter calls him Ivan. That tells us the language of the charter.
In the inner narthex the monks left an inscription. Prestavi se rab božii Repoš, douks ilirskii, 6939. The servant of God Reposh passed away, Illyrian duke, in the year 6939 of the world. They had Slavonic. They had the family’s Slavic names in front of them. And under Reposh they nevertheless wrote Illyrian duke. Whatever boundaries that word carried in 1431, the monks who buried him did not think his Slavic name had exhausted the question of what he was.
His youngest brother collected names the way the frontier hands them out. In the Hilandar charter he is Đurađ. In Venice’s papers he is Giorgio Castriota, son of Giovanni. In Ottoman service he was İskender Bey, and the name-title stuck so hard that his own people still use it. Latin chroniclers called him Georgius. Slavonic, Venetian, Ottoman and Latin records; three scripts; none of them asked him. Albanian barely enters the surviving record of his lifetime. In 1462, six years before his death, his ally Archbishop Pal Engjëlli set one Albanian sentence, a baptismal formula, inside a Latin church document. The first printed book in the language came in 1555.
So the record of a man’s name in the fifteenth century is also a record of who held the pen. The trick comes afterwards, and it is the one Mazreku’s sentence exposes, Venizelos articulated and Lausanne administered: from the layers a man lived inside, take the one useful to your claim and make it the whole man.
If Stanish makes the Kastrioti Serbian, the rule should be followed where it leads.
Stefan is Greek in origin. Every Nemanjić king carried it. Dušan had himself crowned in Skopje in the Byzantine rite, under Byzantine titles, and styled himself emperor of the Serbs and the Greeks; his chancery wrote to the south in Greek. By the method that made Reposh a Serb, the Nemanjići were Greeks and medieval Serbia was a Greek state.
No Serbian historian would sign that sentence. Nor should one. A crown that takes its names and its liturgy from Constantinople remains the crown of the people who obeyed it. The Albanian asks for nothing Serbia does not already claim for itself.
The account that posted Reposh’s grave beside the Vienna helmet on 5 September, and told its seven thousand followers to cherish both as Serbian, did so on the day the Dom Vojske in Belgrade filled for Ratko Mladić. Under the post a hundred replies argued about a tomb. The argument is older than any of the accounts. Gopčević had it in 1890. The pamphlets of 1913 had it, when Serbia wanted a port and the people in the way had to be a people without a hero. Vladan Đorđević, physician and former prime minister, wrote that year that it was frankly unpleasant to have to take from the Arnauts the one hero they had ever managed, since Serbs had so many, but that history could not be falsified for their sake. Dimitrije Tucović answered that literature the next year. Its purpose, he wrote, was to prove the Albanians incapable of cultural and national life; he singled out the attempt to explain Skanderbeg through Serbian descent as one of its absurdities.
Saul, the Acts say, was also called Paul. Neither name cancelled the man.
The registers are all that survive. The kitchens where the names were first spoken are not.
Maringlen Cara writes on religion, law and public life in Albania and the region. A Catholic and a constitutional conservative, he holds that a church which serves the state stops being a church.
