Sheepherder in Pojan, Albania.
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Having landed in Sarandė, reclaimed our
passports, and hired a taxi, we now followed one of these
Roman roads to the east, our final destination being the
small Greek village of Vangelati. The heat was
unbearable, the road (though 2000 years old, better than
any the Albanian government might construct) bumpy and
dusty. I worried about our wine, sloshing around in the
overheated trunk. The main street out of Sarandė was
lined with old women cloaked in black, twirling spindle
whorls. We might have stepped back in time.
We had never been to Albania, let alone Vangelati, so we
did not really know where we were going, nor exactly how
long it would take to get there. We could not ask the
driver. He spoke only Albanian and a smattering of
Russian. For our arrival, we carried a slip of paper with
a name written on it in pencil. Adonis Yiotis. He was to
be our host for the next three days. We had never met the
man.
The countryside unrolled before us like an ancient scroll
being carefully opened: worn and damaged, the color of
bleached parchment. To our American eyes, the landscape
appeared strange and somehow unpredictable, arid and
treeless, except for occasional clumps of plane trees
that concealed villages, some of them Albanian, others
Greek, and a few small Gypsy settlements. Garden plots
checkered the hills and valleys, interlaced with lines of
domed concrete bunkers, built by the paranoid Communist
dictator Enver Hoxha, who feared an attack from the West
that never came.
For two hours we drove into the hills, never exceeding
twenty miles per hour. Finally, our driver pulled over to
the side of the road, next to the ruins of what appeared
to have once been a Roman temple. “Vangelati,”
he pointed to a spot in the near distance, perhaps a
quarter mile away. The sun was sinking over the rim of
the valley and Vangelati was already bathed in shadow.
Smoke from cooking fires curled skyward above the
camouflaged village. A rooster crowed, and
children’s laughter echoed over tiled roofs. We
collected our wine, shouldered backpacks, and began the
steep climb up the path to the first of the houses.
It was 1995, only four years after the collapse of
Communism in Albania and the opening of once hermetically
sealed borders. The wedding we had come so far to attend
was that of our friend, Bill, an American, to an Albanian
woman, Lua. Bill had lived in Athens for much of his
life, working as an itinerant archaeologist and, in the
off-season, a teacher of English. During a spell of
financial difficulty, he took a job picking grapes. Most
of the migrant workers with whom he labored, all of them
illegal aliens, were Greek Albanians, northern Epirotes,
from the village of Vangelati. When the wall fell, Bill
was one of the first Westerners into Albania. Vangelati
was his adopted home town.
Shortly after his initial foray into Albania, Bill was
walking down a busy street in Athens. A gaunt, disheveled
man approached him and asked for money. The man was
clearly Albanian. Bill asked him his name –
“Yiannis” (a.k.a. Fatmir) – and what he
was doing in Athens. The answer: “Just trying to
survive.” On a whim, Bill told Yiannis that he had
an extra room in his apartment. He could stay with Bill
until he found a job.
Yiannis was astonished. Albanians are vilified and hated
in Greece, especially Athens, blamed for all sorts of
violent crimes. Yet here was a man willing to shelter and
feed an Albanian.
The Albanians possess a canon of law called the Lek
Dukagjini. This medieval corpus of customary laws was
only written down for the first time in 1913. One of the
most sacred of these laws is that regarding guests. Once
a person has guested in your home, or you in his, you are
bound to protect one another and the members of each
other’s family, no matter what the circumstances.
The prescribed penalty for breaking this law is death.
During the Nazi occupation, Albania had the fewest number
of Jews deported to concentration camps of any Eastern
European country. The Albanian Jews, most of whom have
now gone to live in Israel, had Christian and Muslim
friends sworn, at all costs, to protect them. Such a bond
tied Yiannis to Bill, and vice versa.
And now Bill was marrying Yiannis's sister. The first
half of the wedding was to take place in the
family’s village of Gorishove, where Bill would
accept Lua's dowry, consisting mostly of linens she had
begun embroidering as a young girl. Then the Albanian
contingent would travel by taxi to Vangelati where a
Greek Orthodox ceremony would take place. For the sake of
convenience, Lua, a Muslim, would convert to
Christianity. Wayne and I had been sent to Vangelati in
advance of the Albanian contingent to help prepare the
wedding feast.
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