Bad history: the myth of Albanized Illyria and its discontents

Written for Kosovo Online by Srđan Garčević, founder of The Nutshell Times

If you ever visit Palermo, you should see byzantine mosaics shining through a forest of columns of various colours, decorated with Norman and Arabic details inside Santa Maria dell’ Ammiraglio. Its dazzling beauty is a testament to the genius of Norman King Roger II of Sicily, famed for attracting talented, capable people of all religions and ethnicities to his budding kingdom precisely by allowing them to keep their creeds and traditions.

The most ancient part of the church was built in the 12th century by a Greek nobleman from Antioch, a few decades before the Nemanjić dynasty started building their magnificent monasteries like Studenica, themselves combining Eastern and Western influences in the medieval Serbian state. What made it even more interesting to me is that, despite being a Catholic church of the Latin rite for most of its history, since the 1930s, it reverted to the Byzantine rite when it became the seat of the Arbëreshë (Italo-Albanian) parish of San Nicolo degli Albanesi. 

To suggest that it should not be a church for Italo-Albanians, a group that settled in Southern Italy and Sicily many centuries after Roger II, or that it should only be stripped of any of its elements to make it more pure and attuned to the community it serves would be considered madness. Similarly, saying that Sicily of Roger II was the same as present-day Italy and claiming that Roger II had nothing to do with his co-ethnics who ruled principalities all over Europe would earn you grunts from any self-respecting historian. 

Yet that is the level of discourse that Priština authorities and friends  (Western diplomats in Kosovo and regional intelligentsia) routinely engage in when it comes to monuments and other cultural contributions made by the Serbs. 

One notable example came not from some random crank historians but from Kurti’s “Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports”, Hajrulla Çeku. In the wake of the clashes close to Banjska monastery, Çeku posted on X that Banjska monastery was built on Roman basilica's remains. 

If this were just a historical tidbit, inserting it in the context of a very recent and significant clash would be strange. But it is not: it was yet another call to the protochronist, the pseudo-historical theory that only Albanians are the true descendants of the pre-Slavic population. That itself is just a quirky rationalization of a present-day political project of a part of an Albanian elite: abolition of all others from what they perceive as "autochthonous Albania".

From Illyria to Kadare

This narrative, formulated in the 19th century and pushed ad nauseam by Hoxha’s and now Kurti’s regime, attempts to portray “Slavs” (primarily Serbs and Macedonians) as colonizers who “only” arrived to the Balkans in the seventh century AD. 

While it cannot decide whether Slavic monasteries and cultural heritage, in general, are either not really Serbian or something that should be removed for the “Illyrian” culture to thrive once again, as it did at an unspecified point a few millennia ago, its end is definitely to remove their connection to Slavs.  

The fact that the whole narrative is explicitly aimed at purging current Serbian and Macedonian  (and to a lesser extent Greek) populations first from history and then land is almost undeniable when seen in the context of what qualifies for Illyrian re-appropriation. 

For example, Albanian nativists are almost, as a rule, uninterested in returning the Ottoman masterworks, like the Painted mosque of Tetovo, to whatever their previous state may be, even though many of them, like the Sinan Pasha mosque in Prizren, have demonstrably been built thanks to the destruction of former buildings, like the Serbian, monumental Holy Archangels Monastery. 

Neither are our current “Illyrians” interested in appropriating the whole Illyrian lands (basically the whole of the Balkans) and repopulating cities like Split, built by Diocletian, a Roman Emperor of proven Illyrian heritage, but only in the territories that roughly formed the Ottoman empire’s rump before the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. This approach, of course, is understandable. The rest of Illyria was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a power that the yet-to-be-formed Albanian state could not engage in a war, and a power that was itself interested in checking the interests of other great powers supporting Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Greece in their opposition to the ailing Ottomans, by making their claims on the lands more contested. 

This ultra-nationalist approach to history reached its physical apex with the creation of Greater Albania during WWII. Still, it was Enver Hoxha's Albania which strengthened its quasi-scientific foundations. That was only after the Hoxha regime, after flirtations with various forms of communism, that the state ultimately decided to build its identity around an ethno-nationalist narrative. 

As Dr Idrit Idrizi of the University of Vienna writes, the crucial part of this project were Albanian academic historians who had a symbiotic relationship with the ruling party. They were handsomely rewarded for promoting narratives that were in support of the national and party lines.

Hoxha’s cultural and historical policies did not stop with books. The regime did not only insist that all non-Albanian personal and place names be Albanized and ethnic minorities completely abolished.

They tried to shape what Albanians were themselves by pressing that children be given constructed "Illyrian" names, instead of traditional and religious ones. 

This went in line with the wish to replace all religions, and thus possible political fissures, with the cult of the Albanian nation. In practice, this meant the destruction of mosques and churches, which were seen as worthless to the new regime. On the other hand, grand projects, like the 1982 Skanderbeg memorial built inside the Krujë castle, were built to bolster the national mythos. 

This grand cultural narrative survived Hohxa’s regime and trickled into the culture. The most visible recent example was Dua Lipa’s posting of the "autochtonous” Albania flag, which includes Corfu, but more striking is Ismail Kadare, Albania’s most renowned living author, after whom a school was recently named in Bujanovac. 

In addition to being a vocal and uncritical supporter of Albanians in Kosovo (despite many documented war crimes), he also tended to insert Slavic/Serb villains in his books and promote the Hoxhaist take on Albanian history while earning praise from the West for being a dissident.  

In his novel “The File on H." he reimagined the real-life expedition of Milman Parry, an American Homeric scholar, to capture Serbo-Croatian epic poetry and use it in his studies of Homeric epics. In Kadare’s retelling, the epics collected are not only Albanian, but the only "Slavic" contribution is to have a Serbian monk, Dušan, burn all the traces of them. In the book, he reimagines the Slavs as "a grey, unending, anonymous Eurasian mass that could easily destroy all the treasures of a land where art had flourished more than anywhere else on earth". In another interview, Kadare is explicit as he is paranoid:  
“This Serbian chauvinism is the chauvinism of new-comers. It is full of inferiority complexes and morbid jealousies. It attempts the impossible: to force the Albanians to forget their culture, their history and their freedom.”

As Ken Kalfus observed in his 1998 review of “The File on H.” in the New York Times,  “Kadare often dismisses nationalism's ''absurd and morbid passions'' and then quickly follows that dismissal with a passionate assertion of Albania's national claims.”. 

The silence of debunkers

Albanian national myth and its mythmakers are far from a unique phenomenon. 

Somewhat ironically, the Balkan Slavs were similarly encouraged by European powers keen to mobilize them to fight the Ottomans, who claimed to be Illyrians since the 16th century. The development of these ideas is seen in the history of the Church of St Jerome of the Croats, which used to be dedicated to all Illyrians, as well as in the naming of Illyrian provinces by Napoleon and the proto-Yugoslav 19th-century Illyrian movement. 

The willingness to project current identities and cleanse their history of current rivals is sadly also widespread these days and certainly not restricted to the Balkans. 

One recent example, though, was Slavica Stojan, a Croatian author and member of one of the most influential Croatian cultural institutions, Matica Hrvatska, who likened Serbs to bugs that have to be exterminated only because Serbian literary scholars claim that the literature of Dubrovnik can be considered both within the canon of Croatian and Serbian literature due to the city's complex history and identity through the ages.

In the past several decades, there have been many initiatives to debunk historical myths to combat chauvinism and misinterpretation of history to fan political strife. Indeed, in Serbia, while the situation is far from perfect, it is only the non-academic fringe who engage in protochronism, and the historical profession is constantly involved in debates that reassess the Serbian role from all sides.

For example, one side of the academic establishment opposed the idea that medieval Serbian rulers, like Stefan Nemanja, should have statues built for them in Belgrade. Similarly, Northern Macedonian attempts to create an ethnically inclusive national myth around Macedonia of Alexander the Great in the 2000s and 2010s, epitomized in the Skoplje 2014 project, have been constantly ridiculed by pundits. 
While debunking historical myths has been fashionable, some seem  sacrosanct and are even fanned by "impartial outsiders." 

When writing about heritage, foreign diplomats in Priština seem weirdly unwilling even to mention their connection with the Serbs, reverting to various euphemisms or appropriating them to the vague “Kosovan” identity, something that is quickly forgotten whenever an Albanian holiday is being celebrated.

Thus, when the German envoy to Priština authorities was hosted in Dečani, an endangered 14th-century UNESCO-protected Serbian Orthodox Monastery, he himself tried to remove any association with the Serbs and indulge this chauvinist rhetoric. His French colleague went even further and temporarily physically displaced a monument to Serbian soldiers who fought alongside the French in WWI, continuing the practice of Priština authorities.

Perhaps we should be more understanding, as even the most tepid pushback to these myths leads to toys being thrown out of the pram.

Whenever somebody tries to challenge the most jingo suggestions by various "historians", they are pilloried by Priština's famously “tolerant, multicultural establishment”. A striking example was the 2020 attack on Andrea Lorenzo Capussela in Koha Ditore, triggered by his rather sensible and carefully worded suggestion that there is such thing as a Serbian contribution to the culture of Kosovo and Metohija. 

One would think that such an entrenched political reading of history, with very real political consequences, would attract academics to disprove and explain. However, the initiatives in this particular area remain sparse. 

They, however, are a necessary pursuit for anybody who wants more peaceful and prosperous Balkans. We need to hope for the future where historical personages like Skanderbeg – whose father and brother are buried in the Serbian Hilandar monastery, which boasts an Albanian tower – would once again become symbols of coexistence and long and fruitful history. 

While many ask us to be content for every day in which Kurti’s regime does not destroy traces of Serbian existence in Kosovo and Metohija, we need to relearn the wisdom of Roger II and allow all the various traditions in the Balkans to create monuments to which they bring their best facets, rather than strain to erase their rivals’.